Help:WikiTerms

From No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis
Jump to: navigation, search
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

The following is just the beginning of a subset of 'wiki' terminology. Continuous additions and updates will be required to keep up with the new, evolving and exciting 'wiki world.'

A

Article
A comprehensive entry. All articles are pages, but not all pages are articles. A Wiki article is defined as a page that has comprehensive or almanac-like information on it ("almanac-like" being lists, timelines, tables or charts).

B

Boilerplate text
A standard message which can be added to an article using a template. For example, Template:Stub is expanded to the following:

C

Category
A category is a collection of pages automatically formed by the Wiki servers by analyzing category tags in articles. Category tags are in the form [[Category:Computers]]. The part after the ":" is the name of the Category. Adding a category tag causes a link to the category and any super-categories to go to the bottom of the page. As stated, it also results in the page being added to the category listing.

D

Dead-end page
Page that has no links to existing other pages, except perhaps interlanguage links. Special:Deadendpages lists them, but this function is disabled in some Wikimedia projects.
Disambiguation
The process of resolving the conflict that occurs when articles about two or more different topics have the same natural title.

N

Namespace
Page titles in a Wiki are composed of two parts: an optional namespace name, and the remainder of the title. For example, this page has the title Help:WikiTerms, so it is in the Help namespace. A title without a colon is in the main namespace.
Each wiki using the MediaWiki software has 16+2 namespaces: the main namespace, where page names have no prefix, 15 additional namespaces, each with its own prefix, and two pseudo-namespaces. In each project they are similar to the 18 explained in w:Wikipedia:Namespace for Wikipedia. One of these is the project namespace, which uses as prefix the project prefix (variable Project below). Some projects have additional custom namespaces. For a list of all namespaces used on meta, see Meta:Namespaces.
Note: namespace prefixes should not be confused with prefixes for interwiki linking; see also Guide for system administrators for setting up interwiki linking.
If a page title contains a colon, but the initial part of the title is not one of the pre-defined namespaces, that page is considered to be in the main namespace.

O

Orphan
A page with no links from other pages. You can view lists of orphaned articles and images.

P

Page
Any individual topic within No Subject - Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis; the web page without the top, bottom and side bars. Pages include articles, stubs, redirects, disambiguation pages, user pages, talk pages, documentation and special pages.

S

Stub
An article usually consisting of one short paragraph or less. There is an optional stub template.

T

Talk page
A page reserved for discussion. Very confusingly, the link to a talk page is labelled "discussion". All pages within Wikipedia (except pages in the Special namespace, and talk pages themselves!) have talk pages attached to them.
See also Help:Talk page.
Template
A way of automatically including the contents of one page within another page, used for boilerplate text, navigational aids, etc.
Transclusion
also used subst'ing
There are two main ways of using templates on articles: inclusion (accomplished by using {{Template Name}}), and transclusion ({{subst:Template Name}}). The former will include the content of Template Name on the fly whenever the article is loaded, while the latter will permanently insert the content of the template onto the article. Thus, using transclusion, if the template content is modified at a later date, the article's content will not change.
Transclusion is the preferred method for long-term, permanent notices, as it is less confusing, and even helps to lighten the load on the database. Transclusion has a further advantage in that a template may be de-linked from any associated category or slightly modified to suit the circumstances, for instance when the template is used on a talk page. Inclusion is preferred when it is possible that the template will be edited or replaced at a later date.
some process pages are said to be transcluded when each day's new additions to the page (or every new item) has its own subpage, linked to the main process page by a template.