Help:Namespaces and User Rights

Pages on a MediaWiki wiki are grouped into collections called "namespaces", which differentiate between the purpose of the pages at a high level. Pages in certain namespaces can also have special properties or behave differently when they interact with other pages.

Namespaces are indicated in page titles by prefixing the page name with "namespace:", so the prefix "Help:" in this page's title ("Help:Namespaces and User Rights") indicates that this page is in the Help namespace. Note, however, that colons and prefixes can also appear in page titles without indicating a namespace: The page Foo:Namespaces and User Rights is a page located in the main space because the namespace "Foo" does not exist. Similarly the page Help:Foo:Namespaces and User Rights is in the "Help" namespace.

Common namespaces

Common public namespaces can be edited by users who have edit rights in one of the namespaces.

News

Namespace holding common news articles.

Equipment

Equipment descriptions should go in this namespace.

User Rights

Basic access to the Manz-Wiki is granted by the right PUBLIC_R. It allows reading articles in all public namespaces. Without this right, login to Manz-Wiki is not possible.

User rights for the department namespaces are organized in three graduations.

<NS>_R

Read right

Allows reading articles in the internal department namespace.

<NS>_E

Edit right

Allows editing existing articles (but not creating new, deleting or moving articles) in the internal and public department namespaces.

<NS>_C

Create right

Grands full author rights to the internal and public department namespaces.

See also:
Full list of rights and allowed actions.

Obtaining user rights

User rights are managed by the IT-Support of Manz. New rights or changes can be requested by email, including a confirmation of the corresponding chief.

Standard namespaces

The standard MediaWiki installation has sixteen namespaces which can contain user-generated content; there are also two special namespaces which contain pages created 'on the fly' by the MediaWiki software. The standard namespaces are organised in pairs, with each pair containing a 'subject namespace' and a 'discussion namespace'. The namespaces are numbered from zero such that all subject namespaces have even indices, and all talk namespaces have odd indices.

File

The File namespace is used to store metadata for images, videos, sound files and other media accessed via the Media namespace. Each file has a corresponding page in the File namespace which is often used to hold licensing data. Linking to a page in this namespace includes the media file inline in the page. Writing [[File:Wiki.png|right]] instead produces the image to the right. See Help:Uploading files for more details on how to use files.

Category

The Category namespace contains categories, dynamic lists of other pages. To facilitate this, linking directly to a category page does not output an inline link, but instead includes the page into the associated category page. So the code [[Category:Help]] causes a category link to appear at the bottom of the page (at the bottom in the box marked "Categories"). Clicking on that link takes you to the category page, where this page is visible in the category list. See Help:Categories for more details on category link syntax.

Template

The Template namespace is used to hold templates, blocks of text or wikicode that are intended to be transcluded in several other pages. To facilitate this it has the special property that it is the default namespace for transclusions: the wikicode {{Foo}} is equivalent to {{Template:Foo}}. See Help:Templates for more details on templates.

Media

This namespace is an alias used for direct linking to media files: the link Media:Example.jpg links to just the image rather than the image description page, which would be File:Example.jpg. See Help:Images for more details of this link syntax.

Help

The Help namespace is used to hold help files, instructions and 'how-to' guides for using this Wiki. It has no special properties.

Manz-Wiki

This is a content namespace that is normally used for meta-discussions related to the operation and development of the wiki. It has no special properties.

MediaWiki

The MediaWiki namespace is used to hold system messages and other important content. For instance, the page MediaWiki:Edit contains the text that fills the "Edit" tab at the top of every page. If that page exists, it overrides the default content, which is "edit this page". Similarly, MediaWiki:Common.css is the system message which holds the CSS code that is loaded for all users for each page. This namespace can only be edited by administrators.