Wikipedia:Project namespace

This page documents an English Wikipedia consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

Shortcuts WP:PRJ WP:NS4 WP:WPNS

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.

The project namespace or Wikipedia namespace is a

• 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.

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

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.

• 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 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

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.

Some pages are designed for discussions, such as the

• Category:Wikipedia discussion
• Category:Wikipedia noticeboards
• Category:Wikipedia requests

Maintenance pages are used to help facilitate the organization and

• Category:Wikipedia maintenance
• Special:SpecialPages

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

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.

• Category:Wikipedia information pages
• Category:Wikipedia how-to
• Category:Wikipedia supplemental pages

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

• Category:Wikipedia essays

Pages of a

• Category:WikiProjects

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 {{

• Category:Wikipedia history
• Wikipedia:Historical archive
• Wikipedia:History of Wikipedian processes and people

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

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

The usual deletion process is to post a request at

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

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

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

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.

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.

See