Research:Content namespace
A content namespace is a namespace that contains the content of a Wikimedia project. In Wikipedia, content is traditionally limited to articles, i.e. pages in the namespace zero (aka the main namespace or ns0, from the numeric identifier that the software assigns to it).
However, a wiki may designate additional content namespaces. For example:
- the Author namespace on Wikisource (example)
- the Anexo (Appendix) namespace on the Spanish Wikipedia (example)
- the Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces on Wikidata
Such extra content namespaces are defined using MediaWiki's $wgContentNamespaces configuration setting. The extra content namespaces used by Wikimedia wikis are listed in InitialiseSettings.php.
Note that this setting can be modified at any point, not just when a wiki or a namespace is first created. For example, for years Wikidata's Property namespace was not designated as a content namespace, but this was eventually changed.
In addition, you can determine this setting for an individual wiki by querying its siteinfo API module. For example, querying the Spanish Wikipedia at the URL https://es.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&format=json&siprop=namespaces returns a list including the following entry for the Anexo namespace:
104": { "id": 104, "case": "first-letter", "subpages": "", "canonical": "Anexo", "content": "", "*": "Anexo" },
The "content": "" marks it as a content namespace.
"Missing" content namespaces
[edit]A number of Wikimedia projects contain namespaces which, from a statistical point of view, should probably be considered content but are not designated as such in the software configuration. This may be due to lack of interest or to the fact that the designation has some side effects (such as on searching).
Examples include;
- the Research namespace on Meta (for example, this page!)