Wikipedia:Project namespace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Wikipedia: project namespace (also called "the Wikipedia namespace" or "Wikipedia: pages") is a namespace that provides information about Wikipedia.
- Pages in the Wikipedia: project namespace will always have the prefix Wikipedia:.
- The Wikipedia: prefix on a page indicates that the page provides information about Wikipedia and how to use it.
- The page you are now reading is located in the Wikipedia: project namespace.
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[edit] Navigation
The main gateway for the project namespace is Wikipedia:Community Portal. A link to this page is always available in the sidebar. The Community Portal includes categorized links to the most useful pages related to the project. For more complete lists of pages in the project namespace, see:
- Wikipedia:Utilities - index of many useful pages
- Wikipedia:Topical index - a list organized by subject
Another helpful tool in navigating the project namespace is Wikipedia:WP, a collection of shortcuts that function as a pseudo-namespace. Some of these shortcuts are displayed on the pages they lead to, as a reminder.
[edit] Rules, policies, guidelines
- Category:Wikipedia official policy contains important rules that are reasonably strict, and procedures for important processes such as deletion; there are very few of those
- Category:Wikipedia guidelines contains consensual rules-of-thumb that are not strict, but are considered by most Wikipedians to be useful most of the time
- Category:Wikipedia policy thinktank is used for proposing new policies, guidelines and procedures
- Category:Wikipedia rejected proposals lists proposals that were rejected by the community
Many pages in Wikipedia namespace have nothing to do with rules, and thus do not belong in these categories.
[edit] Guidelines
The project namespace generally consists of polished pages. That is, these pages should generally not be used for discussion; one should use the talk pages instead. The exception to this rule is when the project namespace page was designed for some specific discussion such as Wikipedia:Requests for adminship.
The project namespace contains many pages and a lot of information, and most Wikipedians probably have not read all of it. To make information easier to find, try to avoid creating new pages in the project namespace unnecessarily. If you want to add material, you might discover that the same thing already exists somewhere else. Before creating a new page, you should consider looking through the topical index to see if the material belongs at a page that already exists.
[edit] Meta
Some people refer to pages in the project namespace as meta pages. However, this can be confusing, because Meta is actually the name of the site dedicated to discussion covering all Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. See Meta.
