Thread:HeyTots/@comment-45554974-20200626020853/@comment-43346949-20200626175245

Check out the information on the Mediawiki help page

They do a great job of breaking it down.

Strictly speaking, they are a mechanism unique to MediaWiki which allows members of these namespaces to be treated differently depending on their intended purpose

i think there are 2 sides to it: 1. a namespace is a way to separate specific kinds of pages on a wiki by purpose and these are demarcated by a prefix, followed by a colon, except for the "main" namespace which has not prefix that covers the basic, "default" namespaces and those include Media Special Talk User User talk Project Project talk File File talk MediaWiki MediaWiki talk Template Template talk Help Help talk Category Category talk

+ "main" (which as mentioned above, has no prefix)

then 2, you can further segregate articles with custom namespaces which can use almost any other name (barring a few special characters like colons, etc) though we discourage that use