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.

Namespaces at Manz

At Manz namespaces are used mainly for two reasons: First to realize user access control; Second to associate articles to departments. Furthermore there can be organizational reasons to create more than one public namespace.

Department namespaces

Each department at Manz has one internal namespace and at least one public namespace. The internal namespace can only be viewed (and edited) by members of the respective department. The public namespaces can be viewed by all wiki users but editing is restricted to department members.

The following table gives an overview of namespaces maintained by Manz departments.

Department	Public namespaces	Internal namespace
Control	Control, AF	CNT
Mechatronics (Drive & Robotics)	Mechatronics	DRV
View	View	VIW
Metrology	Metrology	MET
Service	Service	SRV
Commissioning (Startup)	Commissioning	STP
Axsystems	Axsystems	AXY
Training	Training	TRN

Common namespaces

Common public namespaces can be edited by users who have edit rights in Main namespace.

News

Namespace holding news articles.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Help

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

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.