Wikipedia:Inclusion (essay)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an essay; it contains the advice and/or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. It is not a policy or guideline, and editors are not obliged to follow it.

This is a tentative guideline/policy for inclusion of pages in various namespaces. The intent is to keep it short and clear, and if possible, stable. An important goal is directing people to correct places for what they want to do.

This overview should help you decide what to put where on Wikipedia:

Main namespace

Wikipedia includes articles about notable topics, and articles include only verifiable information.

Portal:

Includes portals, i.e. sub-mainpages for specific topics.

Category:

Includes categories used for grouping of other pages, which are useful to the project as a whole.

Image:

Includes free images and copyrighted images used under fair use doctrine in articles where they are necessary.

Wikipedia:

Includes policy, process, and other pages useful to the project as a whole, but which are not a part of the encyclopedia.

Template:

Includes templates used for inclusion on other pages, which are useful to the project as a whole.

User:

Includes project-related pages which are useful to individual users or informal groups of users.

MediaWiki:

Includes MediaWiki's user interface text. They are all protected by default.

Special:

Includes MediaWiki's builtin special pages with logs, database reports and various extensions. These pages cannot be changed by users.

Talk:

Every page in every namespace can have a talk page for discussion about the content of the page. One exception are user talk pages, which are used for communication with individual users.

Other places

Wikimedia has other projects for useful information which is not appropriate for the encyclopedia. These include Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Wikinews and Wikimedia Commons. If you are interested in a wiki-based personal or group website with fewer restrictions on content, consider choosing one of the free providers of wiki webspace on the internet.