Wikipedia:Project namespace Information & Wikipedia:Project namespace Links at HealthHaven.com

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:PRJ WP:NS4

The project namespace or Wikipedia namespace is a namespace consisting of pages with information or discussion about Wikipedia. Its namespace number is four (4).

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:.

[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 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] Processes

A process is a central and organized way of doing things, generally following certain policies or guidelines (e.g. the "deletion process" proceeds in accordance with the "deletion policy"). See WP:PPP for details.

[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.
Some pages serve as noticeboards to draw attention to discussions taking place elsewhere, such as the centralized discussions page and various Requests for Comments pages.
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 (see WP:ESSAYS).

[edit] Historical pages

A historical page or process is one which is no longer in use, or any non-recent log of any process. Historical pages can be revived by advertising them.

[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.

[edit] See also

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