Wikipedia:Main namespace
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Wikipedia namespaces | |
|---|---|
| Basic namespaces | Talk namespaces |
| Main | Talk |
| Wikipedia | Wikipedia talk |
| Help | Help talk |
| User | User talk |
| Category | Category talk |
| File | File talk |
| MediaWiki | MediaWiki talk |
| Template | Template talk |
| Portal | Portal talk |
| Virtual namespaces | |
| Special | |
| Media | |
The main namespace or article namespace is the namespace of Wikipedia that contains the encyclopedia proper—that is, where Wikipedia articles reside.
The main namespace is the default namespace and does not use a prefix in article page names. This is as opposed to other namespaces where page names are always prefixed by an indicator of the particular namespace in which the page resides. For example, all user pages are prefixed by "User:", their talk pages by "User talk:" templates by "Template:" and various types of internal administrative pages by "Wikipedia:" (such as this page). Thus, any page created without such a prefix will automatically by placed in the article mainspace.
Not all pages in the article namespace are considered to be articles. The most notable exceptions are:
- the Main Page;
- for statistical purposes, some extremely short and simple pages are not counted as articles. The criteria have varied over time;
- thousands of disambiguation pages which are used to resolve naming conflicts;
- many millions of redirect pages which are used to re-route one page to another page; and
- Many Wikipedia lists are navigation tools, rather than encyclopedic articles per se, though annotated lists—especially ones promoted to "featured list" status—are treated as encyclopedic articles.
Each and every Wikipedia article in the main namespace has a companion talk page, and these belong to the "Talk" namespace, i.e., the pagenames start with the prefix "Talk:", followed by the name of the article in the main namespace. For example "Talk:Wikipedia" is the talk page for Wikipedia's article on Wikipedia itself.
