Wikipedia:Project namespace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Project namespace (also called "the Wikipedia namespace" or "Wikipedia: pages") is a namespace that provides information about Wikipedia.
Pages in this namespace will always have the prefix Wikipedia:. They can also be reached by alias WP: or the standard (for any MediaWiki site) prefix Project:.
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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 (inactive since late 2005)
- Category:Wikipedia administration - a list organized by subject
- Wikipedia:List of shortcuts - a collection of shortcuts to many project pages.
[edit] Rules, policies, guidelines
- Category:Wikipedia official policy contains important rules that are widely accepted, 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
[edit] Information and discussions
Many pages in Wikipedia namespace have nothing to do with rules, and thus do not belong in the above categories.
- Some pages are designed for discussions, such as Wikipedia:Village Pump sections.
- Pages with "Wikipedia:WikiProject" prefix form a WikiProject pseudo-namespace.
- Many pages simply provide some information about Wikipedia (like this page). Some of them reflect a particular opinion, and are marked with {{essay}} template.
[edit] Before creating a new page
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 all Wikimedia projects: meta.wikimedia.org.
