Guideline:Project namespace
Sarna News
 | This page documents an BattleTechWiki project content guideline. |
 | This guideline in a nutshell: Project pages are for information or discussion about BattleTechWiki. They should be used to allow users to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute. |
| Namespaces | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Subject namespaces | Talk namespaces | ||
| 0 | (Main/Article) | Talk | 1 |
| 2 | User | User talk | 3 |
| 4 | BattleTechWiki | BattleTechWiki 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 |
| 100 | Policy | Policy Talk | 101 |
| 102 | Property | Property talk | 103 |
| 106 | Form | Form talk | 107 |
| 108 | Concept | Concept talk | 109 |
| 112 | smw/schema | smw/schema talk | 113 |
| 114 | Rule | Rule talk | 115 |
| 118 | Draft | Draft Talk | 119 |
| 828 | Module | Module talk | 829 |
| 3000 | Portal | Portal Talk | 3001 |
| 3010 | Guideline | Guideline Talk | 3011 |
| 3012 | Information | Information Talk | 3013 |
| Virtual namespaces | |||
| -1 | Special | ||
| -2 | Media | ||
| Current list (API call) | |||
The project namespace or BattleTechWiki namespace is a namespace consisting of administration pages with information or discussion about BattleTechWiki. Pages in this namespace will always have the prefix BattleTechWiki:. They can also be reached by alias BTW: or the standard (for any MediaWiki site) prefix Project:. Its namespace number is four (4).
Contents
Terminology[edit]
Project pages or BattleTechWiki pages are pages in the BattleTechWiki and BattleTechWiki talk namespaces. WikiProject pages, which are included in the BattleTechWiki namespace, are usually referred to as WikiProject pages to distinguish them from project pages as a whole.
Content[edit]
Pages within the "Project namespace" themselves are not part of the encyclopedia proper. These administrative pages are intended for use by editors or by automated tools for the organization and governance of the encyclopedia. Consequently, they do not generally need to conform to the same content protocols or style conventions as articles. Nevertheless, these pages, as with all pages, should be accessible and must comply with BattleTechWiki's policies.
The project namespace is not a free web host and should not be used as a long-term archive to host pages that look like articles.
Pages within project namespace[edit]
The project namespace pages are organized according to their function within the overall project schema. This includes BattleTechWiki official guidelines, process pages, discussion pages, optional essays, maintenance pages, informative pages, and historical pages. Policies are to be found in the Policy namespace.
Policies and guidelines pages[edit]
Policies and guidelines pages describe BattleTechWiki's best practice and clarify principles that are widely accepted by the community and have been through the BattleTechWiki review process. These pages are marked with the {{policy}}, {{guideline}} or {{MoS guideline}} template. For summaries of guidelines about BattleTechWiki's house style, see the Manual of Style contents page. For information on editing policies or guidelines see Edits to policies and guidelines.
- Category:Policies – contains important rules that are widely accepted and procedures for important processes such as deletion; there are relatively few of those.
- Category:Guidelines – contains consensual rules-of-thumb that are not strict, but are considered by most editors to be useful most of the time.
- Category:Manual of Style – contains style guidelines widely accepted among editors.
Process pages[edit]
Process pages help facilitate application of the policies and guidelines governing all BattleTechWiki pages.
Information and discussions[edit]
Many pages in the BattleTechWiki namespace have nothing to do with rules or implementation of those rules, and thus do not belong in the above categories.
Discussion and noticeboard pages[edit]
Some pages are designed for discussions, such as the Request for Comment and Research Desk. While many of these pages operate like talk pages, some of them have posting rules (at the top of the page) which may be administratively enforced, and they also have their own talk pages, usually about the management of the noticeboard or other process in question.
Maintenance pages[edit]
Maintenance pages are used to help facilitate the organization and clean-up of articles to bring them up to encyclopedic standards. These pages typically contain articles and other pages requiring maintenance or attention. The Special namespace also contains bot generated maintenance reports (e.g. Special:UncategorizedPages).
How-to and information pages[edit]
Informative and instructional pages are typically edited by the community; while not policies or guidelines themselves, they are intended to supplement or clarify BattleTechWiki guidelines, policies, or other BattleTechWiki processes and practices that are communal norms. Where essay pages offer advice or opinions through viewpoints, information pages should supplement or clarify technical or factual information about BattleTechWiki impartially. In comparison to policies and guidelines, information pages, like essay pages, have a limited status, and can reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. These pages are typically marked with the {{Information page}}, {{BattleTechWiki how-to}}, or {{Supplement}}. The {{Supplement}} template is used for "explanatory essays" is intended as a separate "supplement" banner used for pages derived from policy improvement conversations. The template does not indicate a "higher status" within the community for an essay, but is used to denote that the essay in question has wide acceptance to be linked from said policy or guideline page. See Template:Supplement for more information
There is a large amount of overlap between the Help namespace (which provides mainly technical information) and the BattleTechWiki namespace (which provides mainly procedural information and interpretation). For this reason, redirects and hatnotes are often set up between these two namespaces. See Help:About help pages for more information.
Essay pages[edit]
Essays about BattleTech may be written by anyone; some represent widespread norms, others only represent minority viewpoints. Essays can be long monologues or short theses, serious or funny, informative or opinionated. Essays, like information pages, have no official status, and do not speak for the BattleTechWiki community as they may be created and edited without overall community oversight. Essays are typically marked with the {{essay}} template, as it will separate the pages into the correct category depending on if they are an User essays or BattleTech essays. See Policy:BattleTech Essays for more information.
WikiProject pages[edit]
Pages of a WikiProject are the central place for editor collaboration and organization on a particular topic area. Many WikiProjects compose "advice essays" about how to apply BattleTechWiki's policies and guidelines to their specific subject area. Pages with BattleTechWiki:Project prefix form a WikiProject pseudo-namespace. These pages are typically marked with the {{WikiProject status}} template.
Historical pages[edit]
A historical page or process is one which is no longer in use, or is no longer relevant or consensus has changed about its content. They are kept as records of past Wikipedia processes to give context to historical discussions and to inform future discussions on similar topics. These pages are typically marked with the {{historical}}, {{superseded}} or {{dormant}} templates.
Creating new project pages[edit]
Essays and information pages may be established by writing them and adding {{Essay}}, {{Information page}}, {{BattleTechWiki how-to}}, or similar templates to the page. Essays and information pages in the "BattleTechWiki namespace" should not be used to create an alternative rule set. Creation of new guideline and policy pages require discussion and a high level of consensus from the entire community before publication (see BTW:PROPOSAL for procedural details).
The project namespace contains many pages and a lot of information. Try to avoid creating new pages unnecessarily. Before creating a new page, you should consider looking to see if the material belongs at a page that already exists. It is strongly recommended that you propose a WikiProject at the Request for Comment page or if you have an idea for a project please contact a Sarna Admin or senior editor to get started if there are enough willing editors to participate in the project.