Help:Special pages

The namespace "Special:" consists of "special pages". These have no corresponding wikitext; they are created by the software on demand. Some depend on the preferences that have been set, e.g. classic or enhanced Recent Changes, and the number of titles in Recent Changes and the watchlist, etc.

Alphabetic listing order
In the case of alphabetic lists of pages, ASCII order is used. In particular, a-z come after A-Z. The blank space within a page name is treated as an underscore, and therefore comes after the capitals, and before the lower case letters. However, a "blank space" after the name comes before any character. Sometimes a special character looks like a regular letter, but has a special code anyway.

Thus we have the order PC, PCX, PC Bruno, PCjr, Κύρια Σελίδα.

For the allowed characters in the lower range the order is:


 * !%&'-./[0-9]:;?[A-Z]_[a-z]

Other special characters come at the end.

Special pages for all users

 * Special pages : Special:Specialpages : A list of the other special pages
 * Preferences : Special:Preferences : Set your user preferences. (MediaWiki User's Guide: Setting preferences)
 * My watchlist : Special:Watchlist : Show the pages you are watching. (Watchlist help)
 * Recent changes : Special:Recentchanges : The latest edits in the project. The header is Project:Recentchanges, e.g. for Wikipedia en:Wikipedia:Recentchanges; links to Recent Changes of many language versions of Wikipedia are in Recentchanges/All languages; see also Recent changes help
 * Upload file : Special:Upload : Upload a file to the wiki. (Upload help)
 * Image list : Special:Imagelist : List of images uploaded that can be sorted by size or date
 * User list : Special:Listusers : A list of all registered users.
 * Admins list : Special:Listadmins : A list of all Administrators
 * Statistics : Special:Statistics : total number of pages and users
 * Random page : Special:Randompage : redirects to a random page from the main namespace which is not a redirect
 * Orphaned pages : Special:Lonelypages : Orphaned articles
 * Uncategorized pages : Special:Uncategorizedpages : Pages without category tags (note that after adding a tag to a page refreshing this page does not immediately reflects the change)
 * Unused images : Special:Unusedimages
 * Wanted pages : Special:Wantedpages : Most wanted articles
 * Short pages : Special:Shortpages - pages in the main namespace, with size (of the wikitext excluding that of templates used) in bytes, in order of increasing size
 * Long pages : Special:Longpages - pages in the main namespace, with size in bytes, in order of decreasing size
 * New pages : Special:Newpages : new pages in the main namespace - newest pages in the main namespace, with creation date and time, current size, user who created the page, and first edit summary, in reverse order of creation
 * Oldest pages : Special:Ancientpages - pages in the main namespace, with creation date and time, in order of creation
 * Dead-end pages : Special:Deadendpages : Pages without any outgoing links.
 * All pages : Special:Allpages : All pages by title : pages in the main namespace in alphabetical order; may be temporarily disabled.
 * List of blocked IP addresses and usernames : Special:Ipblocklist : Blocked IPs and usernames
 * Book sources : Special:Booksources : en:Wikipedia:ISBN
 * Categories : Special:Categories
 * Export pages : Special:Export : Exports the source of individual wiki pages, optionally with their histories, in a thin XML wrapper which includes metadata (time, etc).
 * Version : Special:Version : The version of the software the site is currently running
 * Wikimedia Board of Trustees election : Special:Boardvote : Voting software for the now finished elections

Restricted special pages

 * Block user : Special:Blockip : Sysop only. Used to block or unblock users, IPs and ranges of IPs.
 * Restore deleted page : Special:Undelete : Sysop only. One way to undelete a page.
 * Make a user into a sysop : Special:Makesysop : Bureaucrat only.
 * Lock database : Special:Lockdb : Developer only. Puts the wiki in read only mode.
 * Unlock database : Special:Unlockdb : Developer only. Puts the wiki in read/write mode.
 * Show process list : Special:ShowProcesslist : Developer only.

Currently unavailable special pages

 * SQL query : Special:Asksql : Sysop only. Database interface for running queries. Currently disabled.
 * All system messages : Special:Allmessages : Displays all pages in the MediaWiki namespace. Currently disabled.
 * Unicode Converter : Special:UnicodeConverter : Converts Unicode to HTML entities : Not currently available outside of the test wiki
 * Import pages : Special:Import : Sysop only. Imports a page from another wiki. Currently disabled.
 * Popular pages : Special:Popularpages : The most visited pages. Currently disabled.
 * Maintenance page : Special:Maintenance : Currently disabled.

Logs

 * Block log - blocks and unblocks
 * Deletion log - deleted and undeleted pages
 * Protection log - protected and unprotected pages
 * Upload log - list of images uploaded

Linking to a Special page
Special pages can be linked to as usual, like Special:Recentchanges, except when they have parameters, then the full URL has to be given, like an external link, for example  last 10 changes  produces last 10 changes.

A redirect to a Special page may be problematic, see Help:redirect.

Spelling of text in URLs depends on the language of the particular server, e.g. "Special" in English, "Speciaal" in Dutch, "Spezial" in German, "Speciális:" in Hungarian and "מיוחד:" in Hebrew.