MediaWiki orientation

Users

User rights give you permission to do certain tasks—for example, the edit right allows you to edit unprotected pages, and the delete right allows you to delete pages. User rights are bundled into user groups, which correspond to the various roles on the wiki—for example, Users, Administrators, and Bots.

All registered users on a wiki belong to the "Users" group by default. Privileged users (normally bureaucrats) may assign users to one or more additional user groups.

Namespaces

Pages on a MediaWiki wiki are grouped into collections called “namespaces” which differentiate between the purpose of the pages at a high level. Pages in certain namespaces can also have special properties or behave differently when they interact with other pages.

Namespaces are indicated in page titles by prefixing the page name with <namespace>:, so the prefix Help: in this page's title (Help:Namespaces) indicates that this page is in the Help namespace. Each namespace is identified by a number and a name, which can be translated and can also have some aliases.

A page whose name is not prefixed by a namespace lies in the mainspace.

We use the namespaces primarily to manage access rights and moderation.