Wikipedia:Project namespace

Wikipedia data structure

Namespaces
Subject namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	(Main/Article)	Talk	1
2	User	User talk	3
4	Wikipedia	Wikipedia talk	5
6	File	File talk	7
8	MediaWiki	MediaWiki talk	9
10	Template	Template talk	11
12	Help	Help talk	13
14	Category	Category talk	15
100	Portal	Portal talk	101
118	Draft	Draft talk	119
126	MOS	MOS talk	127
710	TimedText	TimedText talk	711
828	Module	Module talk	829
Former namespaces
108	Book	Book talk	109
442	Course	Course talk	443
444	Institution	Institution talk	445
446	Education Program	Education Program talk	447
2300	Gadget	Gadget talk	2301
2302	Gadget definition	Gadget definition talk	2303
2600	Topic		2601
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media
Current list

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:.

Chester Music school

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

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.

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.

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.

See also

• Wikipedia:Glossary
• Wikipedia:Historical archive
• Wikipedia:List of base pages in the Wikipedia namespace