Wikipedia:Project namespace

This page documents an English Wikipedia
consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

This guideline in a nutshell:

Project pages are for information or discussion about Wikipedia. They should be used to allow Wikipedians to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute.

Wikipedia data structure
v
t
e
Namespaces
Subject namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	(Main/Article)	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
118	Draft	Draft talk	119
710	TimedText	TimedText talk	711
828	Module	Module talk	829
Former namespaces
108	Book	Book talk	109
442	Course	Course talk	443
444	Institution	Institution talk	445
446	Education Program	Education Program talk	447
2300	Gadget	Gadget talk	2301
2302	Gadget definition	Gadget definition talk	2303
2600	Topic		2601
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media
Current list (API call)

The project namespace or Wikipedia namespace is a

administration pages with information or discussion about Wikipedia. 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:. Its namespace number is four (4).

Terminology

Project pages or Wikipedia pages are pages in the Wikipedia and Wikipedia talk namespaces. WikiProject pages, which are included in the Wikipedia namespace, are usually referred to as WikiProject pages to distinguish them from project pages as a whole.

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 at meta.wikimedia.org.

Content

Shortcuts

Pages within the "Project namespace" themselves are not part of the

style conventions as articles. Nevertheless, these pages, as with all pages, should be accessible and must comply with Wikipedia's conduct and legal

policies.

The project namespace is

harass anywhere on Wikipedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, these types of pages are subject to expeditious deletion. See below

for more information.

Pages within project namespace

Shortcut

WP:PAGES

The project namespace pages are organized according to their function within the overall project schema. This includes Wikipedia official policies and guidelines, process pages, discussion pages, optional essays, maintenance pages, informative pages, and historical pages.

For lists of pages in the project namespace, see:

Wikipedia:Directories and indexes – a handy list of Wikipedia's directories and indexes.
Wikipedia:Department directory – a list of the different administrative divisions of Wikipedia.
Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia – an enormous list of the Wikipedia community, intended to help find anything not in the encyclopedia itself.

A main gateway for the project namespace is Community portal. The Community Portal includes categorized links to the more commonly used pages related to the project. A link to the Community Portal page is available in the sidebar.

Policies and guidelines pages

Shortcut

WP:POLICYPAGES

Wikipedia review process. These pages are marked with the {{policy}}, {{guideline}} or {{MoS guideline}} template. For summaries of key policies, see List of policies. For summaries of key guidelines, see List of guidelines. For summaries of guidelines about Wikipedia's house style, see the Manual of Style contents page. For information on editing policies or guidelines see Edits to policies and guidelines

.

Category:Wikipedia policies – contains important rules that are widely accepted and procedures for important processes such as deletion; there are relatively few of those.
Category:Wikipedia guidelines – contains consensual rules-of-thumb that are not strict, but are considered by most editors to be useful most of the time.
Category:Wikipedia Manual of Style – contains style guidelines widely accepted among editors.

Process pages

Shortcut

WP:PROCEPAGES

Process pages help facilitate application of the policies and guidelines governing all Wikipedia pages (e.g., Wikipedia:Articles for deletion). See Wikipedia processes for details.

Category:Wikipedia processes

Information and discussions

Many pages in the Wikipedia namespace have nothing to do with rules or implementation of those rules, and thus do not belong in the above categories. See Wikipedia:The difference between policies, guidelines and essays for more information.

Discussion and noticeboard pages

Shortcut

WP:DISPAGES

Some pages are designed for discussions, such as the

requests for comments pages. While many of these pages operate like talk pages, some of them have posting rules (at the top of the page) which may be administratively enforced, and they also have their own talk pages, usually about the management of the noticeboard or other process in question. To ask a question or make a request, see the request directory. For a listing of ongoing discussions and current requests, see the dashboard

.

Maintenance pages

Shortcut

WP:MAINTPAGES

Maintenance pages are used to help facilitate the organization and

Wikipedia:Dusty articles). The Special namespace also contains bot generated maintenance reports (e.g. Special:UncategorizedPages). See Wikipedia maintenance

for details.

How-to and information pages

Shortcuts

Informative and instructional pages are typically edited by the community; while

vetting. These pages are typically marked with the {{Information page}}, {{Wikipedia how-to}}, or {{Supplement}}^[a]

template.

There is a large amount of overlap between the Help namespace (which provides mainly technical information) and the Wikipedia namespace (which provides mainly procedural information and interpretation). For this reason, redirects and hatnotes are often set up between these two namespaces. See Help:About help pages for more information. For a listing of how-to and information pages, see the help directory.

Essay pages

Shortcut

WP:ESSAYPAGES

Essays about Wikipedia may be written by anyone; some represent widespread norms, others only represent minority viewpoints. Essays can be long

one of the various {{essay}} templates. See Wikipedia:Essays for more information. For a listing of essays, see the essay directory

.

Category:Wikipedia essays

WikiProject pages

Shortcut

WP:PROPAGES

Pages of a

advice essays" about how to apply Wikipedia's policies and guidelines to their specific subject area. Pages with Wikipedia:WikiProject prefix form a WikiProject pseudo-namespace. These pages are typically marked with the {{WikiProject status}} or {{WikiProject advice}} template. For a listing of projects, see the directory of WikiProjects. For additional resources, or if you have any questions, please visit the WikiProject Council

.

Category:WikiProjects

Historical pages

Shortcut

WP:HISPAGES

A historical page or process is one which is no longer in use, or is no longer relevant or consensus has changed about its content. They are kept as records of past Wikipedia processes to give context to historical discussions and to inform future discussions on similar topics. These pages are typically marked with the {{

HISTORICAL

for more details.

Creating new project pages

Shortcut

WP:PRJCRE

Essays and information pages may be established by writing them and adding {{

WP:PROPOSAL for procedural details). For general recommendations about the creation and improvement of existing guideline and policy pages, see Wikipedia:Policy writing is hard

.

The project namespace contains many pages and a lot of information. Try to avoid creating new pages unnecessarily. Before creating a new page, you should consider looking through the

WikiProject at the proposal page, if there are enough willing editors to participate in the project. Already existing WikiProjects can be found in the directory of WikiProjects

.

Deletion of project pages

Shortcut

WP:PRJDEL

If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page. Disputes over page content are usually not dealt with by deleting the page, except in severe cases. The content issues should be discussed at the relevant talk page, and other methods of

appropriate template

.

The usual deletion process is to post a request at

miscellany for deletion to have project pages deleted

. Make sure that a notice of the request is posted to the talk page of the affected project. If the project is under a parent WikiProject, a notice should be posted there as well.

Essays, information pages, and other informal pages that are only supported by a small minority of the community may be moved to the primary author's userspace over deletion. The Wikipedia community has historically tolerated a wide range of Wikipedia related subjects and viewpoints on user pages.

It is generally preferable that

WP:INACTIVEWP

for more details.

Policies, guidelines and process pages

Policies, guidelines and process pages should not be nominated for deletion, as such nominations will probably be considered

WP:Local consensus

for more details.

Copyright violations

If the entire project page is a copyright violation, nominate it for

revision delete is usually more appropriate. To request revision-deletion for copyright violations, see {{Copyvio-revdel

}} for details.

Namespace history

The Wikipedia namespace began after the January 2002 release of the Phase II software. Prior to that, an index of related pages was maintained at Wikipedia utilities, which remained for some time afterwards at Wikipedia:Utilities. This list of pages in the project namespace has been replaced by the pages as described above.

Project namespace search

By default, Wikipedia's search engine looks in the Article namespace. To search in the Wikipedia namespace, you would type the project page prefix Wikipedia: (Wikipedia followed by a colon) or WP: (WP followed by a colon), followed by some text identifying or relating to the search target. You can also use the Special:Search box below to locate Wikipedia/Project namespace pages. See Help:Searching for more information.

Project namespace banners

See

Wikipedia:Template messages/Wikipedia namespace

for a listing of Wikipedia namespace banners.

Notes

^ The {{Supplement}} template used for "explanatory essays" is intended as a separate "supplement" banner used for pages derived from policy improvement conversations. The template does not indicate a "higher status" within the community for an essay, but is used to denote that the essay in question has wide acceptance to be linked from said policy or guideline page. See Template:Supplement for more information.

[1] The {{Supplement}} template used for "explanatory essays" is intended as a separate "supplement" banner used for pages derived from policy improvement conversations. The template does not indicate a "higher status" within the community for an essay, but is used to denote that the essay in question has wide acceptance to be linked from said policy or guideline page. See Template:Supplement for more information.

[a]