Help:Terminology

Theosophy Wiki and its underlying Mediawiki software use some specialized terminology.

Article or page

"Article" and "page" are used as synonyms to refer a block of formatted text about the specific person, place, thing, event, or concept mentioned in the page's title. When surrounded by pairs of square brackets, this title turns into a link to that article/page. For example:

[[Helena Petrovna Blavatsky]] links to the page Helena Petrovna Blavatsky.

Magic words

Magic words are strings of text that the MediaWiki software associates with a returned value or a function. See Mediawiki's Help:Magic words for more detail. Here are some examples:

• __NOTOC__ suppresses the table of contents, as was done on this page.
• {{CURRENTYEAR}} makes the current year appear at that location, such as 2025.

Namespaces

Namespaces provide a mechanism for grouping or separating wiki pages. When using the Search function, the default is to the Main namespace, but you can view a page within one of the namespaces by preceding that page with the namespace and a colon, such as Category:Writers or File:WQ Judge.jpg. See the Mediwiki article Namespaces for detailed explanations, and go to All pages with prefix to display lists of pages within a namespace.

These are namespaces that most editors will encounter:

• Category namespace contains categories, which are dynamic lists of other pages. Linking directly to a category page does not output an inline link, but instead includes the page into the associated category page.

• File namespace is used to store metadata for images and other media. Each image file has a page in the File namespace which has descriptive information and licensing data. Linking directly to a page in this namespace causes the image to be displayed at that location.

• Help namespace holds help files on various topics.