Editing Help:Contents (section)

=== Namespaces ===

Namespaces are sets of pages with certain prefixes (or no prefix).  Most content articles (i.e. information about traditional games) are in the "Main" or "Article" namespace, as they have no prefix.  The User namespace consists of all pages starting with "User:", and by convention, "User:Foobar" is "reserved" for the user with username Foobar (there is no technical enforcement of this convention, hence the quotes around "reserved"; it's just polite).  The File (or Image -- they are treated identically by MediaWiki) namespace is for, unsurprisingly, files and information about them.  The Category and Template namespaces are for categories and templates, and they are rather different from the others; see [[Help:Category]] and [[Help:Template]] for more technical details.

Each namespace has a corresponding talk namespace (Talk, User talk, File talk, Category talk, Template talk,...), to be used for pages about pages -- for instance, if there is some disagreement about the page "Barbaz", users with an opinion on the matter might discuss it on "Talk:Barbaz".  The User talk namespace works a little differently; it is meant for talking to a user, rather than only commenting on the user's userpage (in fact, many users on this wiki have a user talk page but have not bothered to create a userpage), and so when edits are made to a user's user talk page, that user will see a notification (if he or she is logged in).

Wikipedia's [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Namespace|namespace page]] has more details on namespaces, but 1d4chan has a few special namespaces that Wikifag defined manually:

* '''Campaign''' is for personal [[campaign]]s and related articles -- character pages, session summaries, house rules, and so on.  Pages in this namespace are not treated as "content pages" by the wiki; this means that [[Special:Random|Random page]] will not land on them, and they will not appear in the lists of [[Special:LonelyPages|Orphaned pages]] or [[Special:DeadendPages|Dead-end pages]] (pages with no internal links leading in or out, respectively).  This is because campaigns are generally only of interest to the people running them; users browsing the wiki at random probably don't much care about games run by strangers over the Internet.  Similarly, because these pages are really only used by people involved in the campaign, they probably aren't linked to by other pages, and probably don't have links to other pages (with the possible exceptions of character pages and other pages related to the campaign).  If we didn't designate them as non-content, they would have an increased tendency to clog up those maintenance lists.
* '''Quest''' is for [[quest]]s run on [[:/tg/]] and related articles.  Though quests and campaigns are similar in many ways, they are given separate namespaces because they differ in a key respect: quests are run on /tg/ "in public", and involve many more people (potentially the entire board, for the really big ones).  They are potentially of interest to the entire board and 1d4chan reader base, so pages in the Quest namespace ''are'' designated content pages, and therefore can be reached by [[Special:Random|Random page]], and will appear in the lists of [[Special:LonelyPages|Orphaned pages]] and [[Special:DeadendPages|Dead-end pages]]. The suggested model to use when creating a new article describing a quest can be found at [[Quest:Quest Article Template]].
* '''Setting''' is for /tg/-created homebrew settings.  Like Quests, pages in the Setting namespace are content pages, for much the same reason.  It is not meant for official settings (we have regular articles for discussing those) or settings that are within the scope of a single party's campaign (those should be part of the group's Campaign pages, e.g. Campaign:Foo/Setting).
* '''Story''' is for stories.  Shocking.  Pages in the Story namespace are also content pages, for the same reason.
* '''/TG/heim''' is for [[:/TG/heim]] warbands, battle logs, league leaderboards, and other such pages.

These namespaces (in addition to the User namespace and all of the talk namespaces) support the subpage feature, allowing related articles to be grouped together -- for example, a campaign named "Foo" could have its main page as "Campaign:Foo", and then have character sheets at pages "Campaign:Foo/Character 1" and "Campaign:Foo/Character 2", house rules at "Campaign:Foo/House Rules", and so on; similarly, a homebrew setting could have articles on the various inhabitants as subpages, and a story can have its chapters as subpages (especially for really long stories).  Subpages will have links to their parent page (and if they're several layers down, say "Campaign:Foo/Bar/Baz", they will have links to their grandparents and great-grandparents and so on, all the way up to the top -- subpages can have subpages themselves) at the top of the page, just below the title, and can be made to show links to their subpages with the [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SubPageList SubPageList extension].  For more information on how to use subpages, see [[Help:Subpages]].