Namespaces

There is a short list of namespaces that are built into this wiki

Special:PrefixIndex

You can find out more about them in the w:Wikipedia:Namespace page.

You can reference a particular namespace in a link using a Compact URI (CURIE) syntax

E.g. [[Category:Development]] will link to the page 'Development' inside the Category namespace. Built-in namespaces are also tied to built-in functionality so for example an 'Image' link inserts that image into the page.

Interwiki Links

Interwiki Links are another use of CURIEs to make it very easy to link to other important/useful websites without so much effort.

E.g. [[google:foo]] will produce a link to the Google results page for a search for 'foo' like this google:foo (Note that the Interwiki prefix is not case sensitive, so Google works as well as gOOgle. Lowercase is preferred. Note too that in order to suppress the display of the namespace in the link, you'll want to use the pipe syntax to format the link text: [[google:foo|search for 'foo' on Google]] results in this: search for 'foo' on Google

There is a long list of convenient Interwiki Links available to you (displayed by the Interwiki extension): Special:Interwiki If you run your own mediawiki installation, get the Interwiki extension. It makes it so simple to add more short-cuts like 'w' for wikipedia.

Directly in the database, you can look at the 'interwiki' table:

SELECT iw_prefix, iw_url FROM interwiki