User:Cpiral/refactor Help:Special Pages

Special is a namespace categorizing the underlying Wikipedia software, WikiMedia. What is special about Special pages is that they are not your usual "WikiPedia text". They are more like "WikiMedia text", because WikiMedia is written in PHP, and so are pages in the Special namespace. This is demonstratable by refreshing for an updated report several times, and then noticing that a single browse backwards will goto the previous page, and not the previous report.

Wikipedia is writtin in wikitext, and WikiMedia renders that wikitext using PHP. Special pages are more directly WikiMedia software, and thus require a virtual namespace. The Special namespace is a virtual namespace because to Wikipedia users, there is only clicking on a link, and the page magically appears, wherease in the relatively concrete world of wikitext, we can have a hand on the rendering of the page.

The page will render "Special" on in somewhere, and clicking on that word usually calls for the page's automatic, in-place regeneration. The URL will usually have  in it.

There is a list of Special pages at Special:SpecialPages.

Notice your web browser's address bar displays  for your pages, but not for your
 * my talk
 * my watchlist, and
 * my contributions
 * log out completed page

For example, did you ever notice the  special page  title on your Recent Changes report page? Notice the word  in your URL of your Recent Changes report. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=3&limit=10 Two of the parameters  in this example come from the user preferences. Here is another example of the contents of a Special page. Special:Log/block The parameter is.

A Special page is not permitted to accept a redirect. They are categorized in a namespace called "Special:", but it is a virtual namespace, really, and it is not permitted to create your usual pages beginning with the "Special:" prefix.

Special pages are not the only script driven pages on Wikipedia. So are the toolserver reports. But toolserver projects are not "Special" pages because they are not so virtual to that community, for that community is the programmers who made to maintenance and operating tools that WikeMedia is today. See WP:Database reports.