Namespace

What are namespaces?

Namespaces are used to divide a wiki into different areas.

Namespaces structure and organize a wiki for these purposes:

• Rights management: To assign content to different rights and roles. For example, a company's HR department can use its own namespace to grant only Human Resources personnel access to the pages in that namespace a major reason for creating namespaces. However, flat hierarchies are recommended for wikis.
• Search function: To exclude pages and files in the wiki from the search.
• Design: To format pages in different wiki areas differently.

We often take the example of cupboards to make clear the principle of namespaces. There are shelves where everyone can look inside and work on something. There are glass cupboards with a lock that you can look into, but not everyone can handle everything. There are closed wooden cabinets with lock, then only selected people can look inside and work on it. And every cupboard can look different.

BlueSpice Standard Namespaces

Among other things, BlueSpice uses the 15 standard and two so-called pseudo namespaces from MediaWiki:

ID	Namespace	Function
	Media	Pseudo-namespace for uploaded images and files. Will be replaced by path of the files.
	special	Pseudo-namespace for special pages.
0	(pages)	These are given without a prefix.
1	Talk	talk page. Is created in addition to each article (also in the following namespaces) to speak about its contents. Additional tab (+).
2	User	User page. Will be created for every logged in user.
3	User talk	Cf. talk
4	[Wiki-Name]	Information about the wiki or the current project. Here: BlueSpice.
5	[Wiki-Name]_Talk	Cf. talk
6	Image	Description of a picture and other files. Is automatically supplemented with version information and information about the occurrence of the file
7	File_Talk	Cf. talk
8	MediaWiki	system messages. A complete list can be found under Special: AllMessages. Can only be changed by registered users.
9	MediaWiki_Talk	Cf. talk
10	Template	Templates can be integrated into other pages.
11	Template_talk	Cf. talk
12	Help	Help pages describe how to perform actions in the wiki. No clear separation from the [wiki name] namespace.
13	Help_talk	Cf. talk
14	Category	Pages can be assigned to categories, which are then accessible in this namespace.
15	Category_talk	Cf. talk

Standard namespace: A page is assigned to the (pages) namespace, as long as no other information is given.

Pseudo namespaces: The two pseudo namespaces (medium, special) are used like normal namespaces, but neither pages can be created nor existing pages changed.

Most pages in the namespaces are created automatically:

• Special pages are generated by the system during installation
• Media and image pages are created by uploading a file
• User pages are created whenever a user acts on the wiki
• Discussion pages are also created with the respective pages
• This leaves only the pages in the main namespace (pages), [wiki name], template, help and category that can be freely created. The pages for the respective categories can be requested via the special page "All pages".
  

Note: In the default MediaWiki, the names of these areas are "hard-coded". This means that they have been set in the source code of the MediaWiki and can not be changed by the users.

Calling pages in the namespace

To address or create a page in a specific namespace, its name is simply placed in front of the page title and separated by a colon:

Setup:Installation

In the example, the pipe symbol (straight line) was also added. It has the effect that the name space can not be displayed when the link is displayed or another text can be entered, which facilitates readability.

If you specify a namespace that is not known to the wiki, the page is created in the standard namespace Main. The portion of the reference specified as the namespace is then added to the title of the item and is not recognized as an area label.

One namespace per page: A page can only be assigned to a single namespace. The same page name in a different namespace creates a new page.

Flat structure: Namespaces are only available on one level. H. a namespace can not have child namespaces.

Search for contents in namespaces: In the search, the scope to be included can be limited to individual namespaces.

Create own namespaces

Even creating your own namespaces is possible in MediaWiki without BlueSpice only with access to the scripts.

In BlueSpice you can create additional namespaces using namespace management.

Organize content without namespaces

However, one can use the syntax of the namespaces to help simulate an area in the namespace Main by prefixing the pages of a desired area with a colon. The general benefits of using namespaces are preserved.

So it is possible to use pages with the same name in different "rooms" and thus let different groups work on a wiki. Since these own "namespace" prefixes are part of the page name, you can now display all pages in a "namespace" by searching for the prefix in the search field.

Since you can organize pages across categories and subpages, you should start by understanding how to manage the content in your wiki.

You can visualize this for example with the BlueSpice draw.io Plugin directly in BlueSpice and discuss it with your team.

All pages of a namespace

The display of all pages of a namespace is possible:

• Special Page "All Pages"
• Leave input field empty
• Select namespace and click "Apply"