Everything you never knew you wanted to know about the Mercury Project

From RixWiki

See also Help:Namespace, m:Help:Namespace

Like all wikis using the MediaWiki software, RixWiki has 18 namespaces: the main namespace, where page names have no prefix, and 17 auxiliary types, each with its own prefix.

The concept of namespaces is similar to programming language namespaces and general namespaces.

Basic namespaces

The main namespace or article namespace is the encyclopedia proper (see Special:Allpages). It is the default namespace and does not use a prefix.

The project namespace (prefix RixWiki:, also called the RixWiki namespace) is a namespace that provides information about Wikipedia and how to use it. The page you are now reading is located in the project namespace.

The user namespace (prefix User:) is a namespace that provides pages for RixWiki users' personal presentations and auxiliary pages for personal use, for example containing bookmarks to favorite pages. If you see in the w:RecentChanges list that the user named "Rick DeNatale" has updated some pages, this user name is a link not to Rick DeNatale but to user:Rick DeNatale. (See Special:Listusers).

The image namespace (prefix Image:, also called image description pages) is a namespace that provides info about images and sound clips, one page for each, with a link to the image or sound clip itself. See Special:Imagelist. There are three versions of links to images and sound files:

1. [[Image:Foobar.jpg]] will insert the image directly into the page (not for sound files)
2. [[Media:Foobar.jpg]] will make a text link to the image or sound clip
3. [[:Image:Foobar.jpg]] will make a text link to the image description page

The MediaWiki namespace (prefix MediaWiki:) is a namespace containing interface texts such as link labels and messages. They are used for adjusting the localisation (i.e. local version) of interface messages without waiting for a new LanguageXx.php file to get installed. Each label and message has a separate page. These are protected by default, and unprotected ones are listed at RixWiki:Unprotected MediaWiki messages. An automatically generated list of all interface messages is at Special:Allmessages.

The Template namespace is used to define a standard text which can then be conveniently added within pages, either the text itself at the time of adding, or a reference to the text at the time of viewing the page. The latter way effectively changes all such occurrences of the standard text automatically by just editing the page where the text is defined. These are listed at RixWiki:Template messages and RixWiki:Navigational templates. The majority of this type is not protected.

The Category namespace contains categories of pages, with each displaying a list of pages in that category and optional additional text.

A new addition is the Help namespace. Help pages previously in the Wikipedia namespace, and at Meta, may be moved here at some point in the future, but the namespace has not yet been implemented on all Wikimedia projects.

Talk namespaces

Except for special pages, each namespace has an associated talk namespace. The talk namespaces are designated by adding talk: to the normal prefix. For example, the talk namespace associated with the main article namespace has the prefix Talk:, while the talk namespace associated with the user namespace has the prefix User talk:. Most of the pages in the talk namespaces are used to discuss changes to the corresponding page in the associated namespace. Pages in the user talk namespace are used to leave messages for a particular user.

Virtual namespaces

There are two virtual namespaces that do not relate to pages stored in the database.

The special namespace (also called special pages) consists of pages that are created by the software on demand (for example, Special:Recentchanges). These pages can be linked as usual, like [[Special:Recentchanges]], except when they have parameters, then the full URL has to be given, like an external link, for example http://www.mercuryspacecraft.com/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Recentchanges