Help:Page name

This is an information page. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms, customs, technicalities, or practices. It may reflect differing levels of consensus and vetting.

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Page name is a term for the title of any page on Wikipedia. A page is named for the convenience of linking to it by its title. It is shown on the title line, near the top, in large bold letters.

On Wikipedia, a database stores all the pages, and so a page is also named for the convenience of a

are also stored in the database, and their page names will add the word "talk" to the corresponding page names of their subjects.

A page name on

for a given author.

The namespace

wikilink for that article is Salvo D'Acquisto, and the URL is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvo_D'Acquisto. See Wikipedia:Page name

for an explanation of pagename.

Wikipedia has a lot of material to organize; and although the main purpose is the content of articles, most of the pages on Wikipedia are actually organizational and administrative in nature. Just as the title of any document indicates the precise topic that the subject material covers, so an operative page name on Wikipedia indicates which department it serves. A "page name" is just how things work here, to title, link and transclude any page.

So in fact most pages on Wikipedia have a page name with the form Namespace:Pagename, where Pagename (without a middle space) is simply the subject, and obviously different to page name (with a middle space). And the Namespace is the department the page belongs to, which are described at Wikipedia:Namespace. Adding a namespace to a page name enables subject material to focus into two different topics, each having its own audience. A topic is a narrowed, or focused, subject.

For example, Linking is a subject of two page names, one at

, which is in the Wikipedia namespace, and is for more advanced editors. The namespace "Wikipedia" is for more advanced editors, like the administrators of Wikipedia.

Every single page name on Wikipedia has one other aspect beside the subject and the namespace, and that is its talk page. Each talk page also has the word "talk" added to its page name. The audience for any one talk page is concerned about the content of the related topic page. The guidelines of a talk page are described at Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines. Talk pages for a particular namespace as a whole may tend towards a shared style.

The

is variously "Main namespace", "Article namespace", "Mainspace" or "Articlespace". Articles are so obviously the main reason for Wikipedia in the first place, that a visible namespace doesn't exist, and there is no mention of it in article titles or links.

The topic for a page is also called the pagename or basename. Some examples:

• The page name for the page you are reading is Help:Page name (Help is the namespace, and Page name is the topic). The associated talk page name is Help talk:Page name (Help talk is the namespace, and Page name is the topic).
• For the article Notability, the page name is Notability (Main is the namespace, and Notability is the topic). The associated talk page name is Talk:Notability (Talk is the namespace, and Notability is the topic).
• For the guideline page Wikipedia:Notability, the page name is Wikipedia:Notability (Wikipedia is the namespace, and Notability is the topic). The associated talk page name is Wikipedia talk:Notability (Wikipedia Talk is the namespace, and Notability is the topic).

The term for the Main or the Template namespace conveniently defaults to what is obviously the main reason for the namespace. For example, we can link [[An article title]], but to transclude it we write {{:An article title}}. The ":" character is not part of any namespace name, but here it is as close to the mainspace name as possible. The namespace for an article is a default that is not technically writable in the page name. Although it is not technically necessary to write "Template" in the page name for a

that achieves the text processing power of template code, it remains true that the markup for transclusion is "a page name in double curly brackets".

Any page on Wikipedia can be

are not in the main namespace. The complication of a namespace was minimized, but it is not gone.

The good news is that there is one way to link that can guarantee error-free linking in all cases: render the target page, use the

from the title line of the target page, and use that for your own page. Some of the page names you will find the need to link to in discussion will be policy, guidelines, templates, and the other namespace names. So because the namespace name is in the title, the link will always work by using the title.

• Red link
• WP:Article titles