Guideline:Project namespace

This page is a guideline for project and project talk pages. For information about WikiProjects, see BattleTechWiki:WikiProject.

BattleTechWiki data structure

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).

Terminology

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

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

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

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

Process pages help facilitate application of the policies and guidelines governing all BattleTechWiki pages.

• Category:Procedures

Information and discussions

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

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

Maintenance pages are used to help facilitate the organization and clean-up of articles to bring them up to encyclopedic standards. These editor- and bot-generated pages typically contain articles and other pages requiring maintenance or attention. (e.g., BattleTechWiki:Dusty articles). The Special namespace also contains bot generated maintenance reports (e.g. Special:UncategorizedPages). See BattleTechWiki maintenance for details.

• Category:BattleTechWiki maintenance
• Special:SpecialPages

How-to and information pages

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}} template.

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. For a listing of how-to and information pages, see the help directory.

• Category:BattleTechWiki information pages
• Category:BattleTechWiki how-to
• Category:BattleTechWiki supplemental pages

Essay pages

Essays about BattleTechWiki 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 one of the various {{essay}} templates. See BattleTechWiki:Essays for more information. For a listing of essays, see the essay directory.

• Category:BattleTechWiki essays

WikiProject pages

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:WikiProject prefix form a WikiProject pseudo-namespace. These pages are typically marked with the {{WikiProject status}} or {{WikiProject advice}} template. For a listing of projects, see the directory of WikiProjects. For additional resources, or if you have any questions, please visit the WikiProject Council.

• Category:WikiProjects

Historical pages

See also: BattleTechWiki:Policies and guidelines § historical

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 BattleTechWiki 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. See HISTORICAL for more details.

• Category:BattleTechWiki history
• BattleTechWiki:Historical archive
• BattleTechWiki:History of BattleTechWikin processes and people

Creating new project pages

Further information: BattleTechWiki:Avoid writing redundant essays and BattleTechWiki:Content forking/Internal § Policy forks

See also: BattleTechWiki:User pages § What may I have in my user pages?, and BattleTechWiki:Drafts § Creating and editing drafts

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). For general recommendations about the creation and improvement of existing guideline and policy pages, see BattleTechWiki:Policy writing is hard.

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 through the topical index, essay directory and help directory to see if the material belongs at a page that already exists. It is strongly recommended that you propose a WikiProject at the proposal page, if there are enough willing editors to participate in the project. Already existing WikiProjects can be found in the directory of WikiProjects.

Deletion of project pages

Main page: BattleTechWiki:Miscellany for deletion

See also: BattleTechWiki:User pages § Deletion of user pages, and BattleTechWiki:Drafts § Deleting a draft

If editing can improve the page, this should be done rather than deleting the page. Disputes over page content are usually not dealt with by deleting the page, except in severe cases. The content issues should be discussed at the relevant talk page, and other methods of dispute resolution should be used first, such as listing on "requests for comments" for further input.

The usual deletion process is to post a request at miscellany for deletion to have project pages deleted. Make sure that a notice of the request is posted to the talk page of the affected project. If the project is under a parent WikiProject, a notice should be posted there as well. Essays, information pages, and other informal pages that are only supported by a small minority of the community may be moved to the primary author's userspace over deletion. The BattleTechWiki community has historically tolerated a wide range of BattleTechWiki related subjects and viewpoints on user pages.

Policies, guidelines and process pages should not be nominated for deletion, as such nominations will probably be considered disruptive, and the ensuing discussions closed early. The {{Disputed tag}} template is typically used for claims that an essay, WikiProject advice or information page was recently assigned guideline or policy status without proper or sufficient consensus being established. See BTW:Local consensus for more details.

It is generally preferable that inactive WikiProjects not be deleted, but instead be marked as {{WikiProject status|inactive}}, or redirected to a relevant WikiProject, or changed to a task force of a parent WikiProject, unless the WikiProject was incompletely created or is entirely undesirable. See BTW:INACTIVEBTW for more details.

If a project page clearly satisfies a "general" speedy deletion criterion, it should be tagged with the appropriate template. For issues only affecting specific revisions on a page (where other page versions are fine) revision delete is usually more appropriate. To request revision-deletion for copyright violations, see {{Copyvio-revdel}} for details.

For a complete listing of past and current project namespace deletion requests at MfD, see all MfD pages with BattleTechWiki prefix.

Namespace history

The BattleTechWiki namespace began after the January 2002 release of the Phase II software. Prior to that, an index of related pages was maintained at BattleTechWiki utilities, which remained for some time afterwards at BattleTechWiki:Utilities. This list of pages in the project namespace has been replaced by the pages as described above.