Help:Wiki help

This page lists a number of terms frequently used in a wiki and gives a brief definition of each one. Entries are alphabetically arranged.

Links

Links are obviously one of the most used functions within a wiki. One can link both to internal and external resources.

Internal links

An internal link is a link between two pages within the same wiki.

Namespaces

Namespaces are used to group or separate pages. Usually one can recognize if a page is in a particular namespace by looking at the URL of the page. Some examples:

• http://mediawikiarchivio.unigre.it/mediawiki/index.php/Category:AKC_Letters
• http://mediawikiarchivio.unigre.it/mediawiki/index.php/Special:ListUsers
• http://mediawikiarchivio.unigre.it/mediawiki/index.php/Page:AKC_1652_APUG561_277.pdf/1

In these cases the 'Category', 'Special' and 'Page' namespaces have been used. So, as we can see, usually a namespace preceeds the name of a page with a structure like 'NamespaceName:PageName'. This is always true except for the 'Main' namespace (see below). In a wiki there may be several namespaces and they are used for different purposes: maintenance, development, discussion, articles and so on.
Following a list of the most used namespaces is provided.

(Main)

The so called 'Main' namespace groups all the articles page within a wiki. This is the only namespace whose name is not visible in the URL.

Category

Within the category namespace all the categories of a wiki are grouped (see also Categories).

Form

Pages in this namespace are structured as forms to fill with data. An example is the Form:Bibliography_entries, in this wiki used to add bibliographical data. Almost every user can create or edit an article page using a form, however the form itself can be modified only by administrators.

Index

The Index namespace contains pages where books or manuscripts to transcribe are described. Together with Page namespace, it is part of the Proofread Page extension.

Page

This namespace is used to perform transcriptions using the Proofread Page extension. When you create or edit a page within this namespace, you always see at the right or at the top of the screen (according to your user preferences) the image of the book or the manuscript that you are going to transcribe. See also Index namespace.

Special

The Special namespace groups a lot of pages related to the management and maintenance of the wiki. Not all the pages are visible to and editable by all users, however some of the Special pages are very important to properly work on a wiki. E.g., through the Special namespace you can access to your own preferences (Special:Preferences) or to our wiki chat (Special:Chat); you can also access to a special search for the pages where you can filter them according to their namespace (Special:AllPages); and many other useful stuffs!.

Talk namespaces

Usually on a wiki each namespace is associated to a Talk namespace. This is one of the best known feature of the Mediawiki software architecture, devoloped to foster the discussion among users (without this feature Wikipedia wouldn't exist as we know it). Talk pages are used to propose improvements to a page regardless to the namespace of the page. E.g. one can propose:

• a better reading of a word within the Page namespace;
• a correction within an article in the Main namespace;
• an alternative structure for a form page within the Form namespace.

A user can access to the Talk namespace of a page by clicking on the 'Discussion' tab, next to the 'Page' tab in the top left of the page.