Manual:Namespace

A namespace is a collection of pages which have content with a similar purpose, i.e. pages where the intended use is the same. Namespaces can be thought of as partitions of different types of information within the same wiki, and keep "real" content separate from user>Special:PrefixIndex/User:|user profiles, help>Special:PrefixIndex/Help:|help pages, etc.

!--T:10--> Each namespace has a corresponding namespace index. Within the database, the title is split into namespace index and text title, and this is used === Subject and talk namespaces ===


 * ''See h-talkpg>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Talk pages|Help:Talk pages for instructions on how to use talk {TALKPAGENAME}} pgnames>Special:MyLanguage/Help:Magic words#Page names|magic words. The  tag of pages in talk namespaces has the " " CSS class, which might be useful for styling.

Built-in namespaces
MediaWiki ships with 18 built-in namespaces:
 * 16 "real" namespaces, corresponding to actual pages, numbered 0 to 15, and grouped in subject/talk pairs
 * 2 "virtual" namespaces (one for dynamically generated special pages, and one serving as an alias for direct file links), numbered -1 and -2, respectively. Since these namespaces don't correspond to pages stored in the database, one cannot create or delete pages in these namespaces, and there are no corresponding discussion namespaces.

The full list is presented in the table below.

Each namespace also has a constant derived from its name, with all letters in uppercase, spaces replaced by underscores, and prefixed by "NS_". For example, the constant for the "User talk" namespace is NS_USER_TALK. A complete list can be found in constants>Special:MyLanguage/Manual:Namespace constants|Manual:Namespace constants.

 in MediaWiki 1.13 and above.

All pages in discussion namespaces have a "post a comment" feature (see meta>meta:Special:MyLanguage/Help:Section#Adding a section at the end|Help:Section#Adding a section at the end on Meta).