Screencast explaining Wikipedia namespaces: transcript

Key points

• The main page and all articles are in the main (article) namespace, which has no prefix in the page address.
• Talk pages use the prefix "Talk:" and form their own namespace, separate from articles.
• User pages use the prefix "User:" and user talk pages use "User talk:" followed by the username.
• Other namespaces include Help, with the prefix "Help:", and Wikipedia, for project information pages, with the prefix "Wikipedia:".
• Namespaces keep article, project, talk and user pages separate, and each main namespace has a matching talk namespace such as Wikipedia talk or Help talk.

Chapters

1. 0:01Main namespace and article talk pages
2. 1:37User, help and Wikipedia namespaces
3. 2:39Why namespaces matter and the key ones

Full transcript

0:01Hello, I am Ich du Nicht and today I will tell you something about Wikipedia's namespaces. We start on Wikipedia's main page. The main page is part of the main namespace or the article namespace. That means that no particular prefix is added to the name of this particular page if you look at the website's address or URL up here. and the same applies if we look at any article for example today's featured article I just click on that you will see the name of the article in the website's address line and there's no prefix however if I go to that article's talk page just click on talk you will see that talk followed by colon is added to this address line and this means that we are now in the talk namespace which

1:07is a different set of pages so all talk pages belong to the talk namespace Whereas all articles are within the article namespace. I go back to the article page and you see the prefix has disappeared. The same applies for user pages. So if I go on my user page, which I find here, I have a prefix user followed by colon.

1:37and if I go to my talk page it will read user space talk colon and then my username and there's a number of other namespaces within Wikipedia for example the help namespace which reads like help followed by colon or the Wikipedia namespace which is general project information project pages and they read Wikipedia colon and then the name of the particular page and if we go to that talk page of such a page it will read Wikipedia space talk colon and then the name of that particular page so I go back to the main page you can always go back to the main page right by clicking

2:39onto that Wikipedia possible in the left top right corner So, in fact, it allows to separate various sets of pages from each other, article pages from project pages, from talk pages and user pages. The most important namespace you will come across is the article namespace with no prefix, the user namespace with user colon, the wikipedia namespace with project information wikipedia colon and the help namespace which reads help colon and all those namespaces have their particular talk namespaces such as user talk wikipedia talk help talk and so on

Source and licence

Recording: File:Namespaces.webm by Ichdunich (2020-05-24), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.