Help:Wiki namespaces

What is a 'namespace'?

Well it is a computing term that allows you to separate different sets of data to avoid referring to one instead of another (See Wikipedia on namespaces). For example you might have an article on Finances and you want to write an article on finances for the Knowledgebase project. How would you separate them? Well, you should refer to them by namespace For example: Finances or Finances refers to the article page and category page respectively in the KB about Finances. But YWAMKnowledgebase:Finances would be about finances for this project.

Confused yet?

General Namespaces
When you set up a Mediawiki wiki (of which this is one) several Namespaces are included for you. In this wiki Namespaces are described like this NAMESPACE:TITLE. You should also note that the Namespaces come in pairs. The included name spaces are:


 * 1) (Main): Anything with no namespace or colon is in the main Namespace where all the articles are.  e.g. Main Page Managing in YWAM
 * 2) * Talk: is for the discussion on the development of the page. e.g. Talk:Main Page
 * 3) Help: is for these pages. It was supposed to be for the makers of Wikimedia to include help with the product but for complex issues to do with translations it has not happened. (yet) So we are making our own!
 * 4) * Help talk: is for discussion on pages in this Namespace
 * 5) YWAMKnowledgeBase: is for specific pages to do with our product and our community producing it. See YWAMKnowledgeBase:About, YWAMKnowledgeBase:Community Portal, YWAMKnowledgeBase:Strategy - note in this case how important it is to differentiate between this article and a general article on strategy. This Namespace is created for us when we named the wiki when we started up.
 * 6) * YWAMKnowledgeBase talk: (I think you get the picture!)
 * 7) User: Each registered user can have their own page(s) here. This is really their own space. If you want more than one page, use your name as a prefix for other pages e.g. User:Kevin, User:Kevin note space
 * 8) * User talk: ditto
 * 9) Image: Where all the descriptive text that goes with uploaded images and other uploaded files are kept. (You can add a [[Category: ]] tag here BTW.)
 * 10) * Image talk: ditto
 * 11) Category: Where all the category pages are
 * 12) * Category talk: ditto
 * 13) Template: Where all the template pages are. You are able to pull a template into a page by referring to it within two sets of curly brackets.
 * 14) * Template talk: ditto
 * 15) MediaWiki: All of the messages and text that belongs to the software. This is to help with translations into other languages
 * 16) * MediaWiki talk: ditto
 * 17) Special: This is a a well names Special section. These pages are not editable but they are generated by the software for maintenance, logging in and out etc. Very interesting and worth looking at.

What can I do with namespaces?

 * Keep the project details, information on use of the software, user notes and important discussions away from and out of the articles. This is important as the project grows larger.
 * On the Special:Allpages you can look at a list of all the pages in each name space.
 * You can search each name space specifically once you know which space will hold which data. This page would not normally be returned if you searched for "Rumplestiltskin" except when you specifically request the namespace to be included in the search.