Namespace

ISOGG Wiki namespaces
Basic namespaces		Talk namespaces
0	Main	Talk	1
2	User	User talk	3
4	ISOGG Wiki	ISOGG Wiki 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
16	Portal	Portal talk	17
100	Event	Event talk	101
102	Timeline	Timeline talk	103
104	YTree	YTree talk	105
106	Famous DNA	Famous DNA talk	107
Virtual namespaces
-1	Special
-2	Media

An ISOGG Wiki namespace is a set of ISOGG Wiki pages whose names begin with a particular prefix recognized by the MediaWiki software (followed by a colon), or in the case of the main namespace have no such prefix. For example, the user namespace consists of all pages with names beginning "User:". Encyclopedia articles appear in the main namespace, with no prefix.

ISOGG Wiki has 22 namespaces: 11 basic namespaces, each with a corresponding talk namespace; and two virtual namespaces. These are all listed in the box to the right. Note that the prefixes "ISOGG Wiki:" and "ISOGG Wiki talk:" can be abbreviated to "IW:" and "IT:" respectively when searching or making links (see Aliases below).

Basic namespaces

This page is in the ISOGG Wiki namespace.

ISOGG Wiki's basic namespaces and their functions are listed below.

• Main namespace (no prefix): contains all encyclopedia articles, lists, disambiguation pages, and encyclopedia redirects. Sometimes referred to as "mainspace".
• User namespace (prefix User:): contains user pages and other pages created by individual users for their own personal use. Pages under this namespace can still be viewed and modified by others, so do not keep any of your sensitive data here.
• Project namespace or ISOGG WIKI namespace (prefix ISOGG Wiki:): contains many types of pages connected with the ISOGG Wiki project itself, including: information, policy, essays, processes, discussion, etc. The prefix can be shortened to IW: (see Aliases below), and there are many short redirects in the namespace written with capital letters that make pages easier to access.
• File namespace or Image namespace (prefix File:): contains file description pages for image, videos or audio files, with links to the files themselves. See Special:Filelist.

• A feature called InstantCommons is turned on so many files used in ISOGG Wiki are housed at Wikimedia Commons, those files will not have local pages but instead mirror file pages from Commons. There are three versions of links to files:
• Most common is the prefix Image: which can be used instead of File: (see Aliases for more below).

• MediaWiki namespace (prefix MediaWiki:): a namespace containing interface texts, such as the links and messages that appear on automatically generated pages. Pages in this namespace are permanently protected. For a list of these messages, see Special:AllMessages.
• Template namespace (prefix Template:): contains templates – pages that are intended primarily to be transcluded or substituted onto other pages to insert standard text or boxes such as infoboxes and navigation boxes.
• Help namespace (prefix Help:): contains pages which provide help in using Wikipedia and its software, both for users of the encyclopedia and for editors.
• Category namespace (prefix Category:): contains category pages, which display a list of pages and subcategories that have been added to a particular category, and optional additional text.
• Portal namespace (prefix Portal:): for reader-oriented portals that help readers find articles related to a specific subject, and may contain links to encourage contributions to relevant WikiProjects. See, for example, Portal:Autosomal DNA.

The basic namespaces are sometimes referred to as "subject spaces", especially in contrast to "talk spaces". For instance: "File space is the subject space of the File talk space."

Talk namespaces

Each of the above namespaces (but not the virtual namespaces) has an associated talk namespace—these are also known as "discussion" pages. The talk namespaces are designated by adding talk: to the normal prefix. For example, the talk namespace associated with the main article namespace has the prefix Talk:, while the talk namespace associated with the user namespace has the prefix User talk:. Most of the pages in the talk namespaces are used to discuss changes to the corresponding page in the associated namespace. Pages in the user talk namespace are used to leave messages for a particular user. The user talk namespace is special in that, whenever a user's talk page is edited, that user (if logged-in) will see a box saying "You have new messages" on the top every page that they view until they visit their talk page. (Minor edits made by bots no longer set off the new message bar.)

Note that the prefix IT: expands to ISOGG Wiki talk:, just as IW: expands to ISOGG Wiki: (see Aliases below).

Virtual namespaces

There are two virtual namespaces that do not relate to pages stored in the database:

Special

   See Help page: Help:Special page

The Special: namespace consists of pages (called special pages) that are created by the software on demand, such as Special:RecentChanges. These pages can be linked as usual, as with [[Special:RecentChanges]], except when they have parameters. To use parameters, the full URL must be given as an external link. For example, https://isogg.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Recentchanges&days=3&limit=10, which returns the last ten changes.

You can create a redirect to a Special page, but the redirect will not be followed automatically.

For a list of special pages, see Special:SpecialPages.

Media

The Media: namespace can be used to link directly to a file, rather than to the file description page. It does not work on redirects: the link must be to the file's true name. See information above on the File: namespace.

Aliases

There are six aliases defined for namespaces, all of which are case-insensitive:

Alias	Namespace
IW	ISOGG Wiki
IT	ISOGG Wiki talk
Image	File
Image talk	File talk
Project	ISOGG Wiki
Project talk	ISOGG Wiki talk

If a link is made to a page title beginning with one of these strings, or if such a title is entered in the search box or used in a URL, the alias is automatically replaced by the true namespace prefix. Hence entering IW:Linking or Project:Linking is equivalent to entering ISOGG Wiki:Linking, and IT:Linking is equivalent to ISOGG Wiki talk:Linking.

An alias cannot be used as the actual namespace in a page title. For example, you cannot create page IW:123.

Interwiki links

To refer to content(another wiki article) not on this wiki, interwiki link prefixes are available. For example, [[wp:genetics]] will link to the article 'Genetics' on Wikipedia.

As with aliases, it is not possible to create a page with a title beginning with an interwiki prefix.

It is also not possible to create redirects to interwiki pages.

Pseudo-namespaces

If a page title contains a colon, but the prefix is not defined as a namespace in the software, then the page will be treated as belonging to the main namespace. However some such prefixes have acquired certain specialized uses, and are referred to as pseudo-namespaces.

The most common use of pseudo-namespaces is to make shortcut redirects to pages in one of the basic namespaces. Prefixes sometimes used in this way include:

• CAT: for shortcuts to pages in the Category namespace
• H: for shortcuts to pages in the Help namespace
• TL: for shortcuts to pages in the Template namespace
• P: for shortcuts to pages in the Portal namespace

More possibilities are listed at IW:Shortcut#List of prefixes. Note that while namespace aliases are valid entries in the search bar, pseudo-namespaces are not. Thus IW:Shortcut and P:Autosomal DNA are both valid page search terms.

Case insensitivity

Standard namespace names, aliases and interwiki prefixes are case insensitive. The same applies to the first character after the colon.

Namespace-dependent functionality

The following software functions and configurations are dependent on namespace:

• Search results, listings of recent changes and other special page output (such as Special:AllPages) can be restricted to particular namespaces. (The namespace numbers that appear in the URL when this is done correspond to the variables in the table below.)
• The subpage feature can be enabled or disabled per namespace. It is currently disabled for the File, MediaWiki and Category namespaces. But their talk spaces and all other namespaces have the subpage feature.
• The random article feature is restricted by default to the main namespace.
• Pages in the category and file namespaces are automatically treated as category pages and file description pages respectively, and links to such pages behave in the corresponding non-standard ways.
• The template namespace is the default for transclusion and substitution (the "Template:" prefix can be omitted when performing these operations).
• Messages can be made to appear above the edit box for particular namespaces (for example, in some talk namespaces a message is displayed warning that those talk pages may not be watched by many users).