Help:Introduction to navigating Wikipedia/2

Introduction
Navigating Wikipedia

Namespaces
The different types of pages

Searching pages
Tricks to find what you want

Redirects and shortcuts
Redirecting traffic

Useful links
Handy pages for editors

Summary
Review of what you've learned

Wikipedia's pages are divided into namespace. Each namespace (except the main) has a prefix which appears with a colon at the start of page names.

Namespace	Purpose	Examples
Main/content no prefix	Articles	Starfish
	Disambiguation pages to help people find the article they're looking for	David (disambiguation)
Wikipedia: a.k.a. "Project"	Policies and guidelines	Wikipedia:Neutral point of view Wikipedia:Manual of Style
	Process pages	Wikipedia:Articles for Creation
	Discussion places and noticeboards	Wikipedia:Village pump
	WikiProject communities focusing on a particular topic	Wikipedia:WikiProject history Wikipedia:WikiProject Doctor Who
User:	Personal profile pages about users	User:Jimbo Wales
	Sandboxes and pesonal draft articles	User:The wub/sandbox
Draft:	Draft articles that are in progress	Draft:Exampledraft
Help:	Help pages	Help:Contents
Template:	Templates, which can be included or substituted on other pages	Template:Citation needed Template:Infobox album
Category:	Group pages by their similarities	Category:Painting Category:Wikipedia maintenance
File:	Where images and other files are stored and described	File:Wiki.png
Portal:	Pages to highlight Wikipedia content in a particular topic area	Portal:Current events Portal:Solar System
Book:	Collections of articles which can be saved as a printed book	Book:John Douglas
MediaWiki:	Messages which appear in the wiki software (edited by administrators)	MediaWiki:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning
Special:	Pages which are part of the software	Special:RecentChanges Special:Preferences

All of these namespaces, except for Special, also have a corresponding Talk page for discussion. So for example you can discuss the starfish article at Talk:starfish, or talk about Wikipedia:Neutral point of view at Wikipedia talk:Neutral point of view. You can switch between the normal page and the talk page with the tabs at the top left.

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