Wikipedia namespaces
Basic namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	Main	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
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media

Shortcuts: WP:MWN WP:MWNS WP:NS8

The MediaWiki namespace allows the making of edits to customize or translate the MediaWiki web interface. For details see Help:MediaWiki namespace. To identify a specific mediawiki page, you can search the mediawiki namespace.

Because the changes to these pages have a global effect, only administrators have the ability to edit them. Non-admins who would like to suggest a change can do so by using the {{editprotected}} template on the talk page of the MediaWiki page. Changes that could benefit other wiki sites and are not specific to Wikipedia can be submitted to BetaWiki.

Documentation of the purposes of individual MediaWiki: pages can be difficult because <nowiki> tags do not function in this namespace. Some messages have documentation available by setting the 'language' to qqq (by appending &uselang=qqq to the URL).

[edit] List of system messages

System messages are MediaWiki pages predefined by the MediaWiki software or extensions. They have a default version but can be edited by administrators, as with all MediaWiki pages. A list of all the system messages can be seen at Special:Allmessages. Each listing provides a link to the message and its talk page. The listing also displays the default and current versions of the interface messages.

For a list of all MediaWiki pages, see Special:Prefixindex/MediaWiki:, or search the MediaWiki namespace.

Caution: Some messages must have HTML links, and others must have wikilinks. To find out which is which, you must know where the message is used in the interface.

[edit] History

The MediaWiki namespace was introduced on December 6, 2003. Before this time, user interface text was part of the PHP software and could only be changed by software developers. Since the introduction they have been editable by normal users.

Until June 2004, the MediaWiki namespace was also used for creating other boilerplate text messages, to be used in articles. This function was replaced with the Template namespace; a conversion script running as "User:Template namespace initialisation script", was run by developer Tim Starling, which moved all non-system messages to the new namespace, and replaced MediaWiki: references in articles with Template: in order to bypass the redirects. In October and November 2005, these redirects were deleted. This background explains why the concept now known as "templates" is sometimes referred to as "messages".

For a short time, before the renaming from votes for deletion (VfD) to articles for deletion (AfD), deletion debates used MediaWiki: messages named in the format "MediaWiki:VfD-articlename". These were moved to the Template: space in June 2004 and are now (as of January 2006) subpages of Wikipedia:Articles for deletion or Wikipedia:Votes for deletion.

[edit] See also

• Help:MediaWiki namespace, for technical details