A pseudo-namespace is a group of pages that users treat as a distinct namespace, but which MediaWiki recognizes as part of another namespace (usually the "main" or "article" namespace). This is often caused by user misunderstanding about what a namespace is, or how extra namespaces are added to the software.
Usually namespaces are formally recognized by MediaWiki. There are several benefits provided when a namespace is recognized by the software:
- Special:Recentchanges can display changes to one specific namespace. When pseudo-namespaces are kept in mainspace, this means that users see changes to articles that they aren't interested in.
- Special:Search can display search results from only specific namespaces.
To retain these features, it's better if a wiki can be configured to recognize new namespaces, rather than informally creating them.
Less often, "pseudo-namespace" refers to local namespaces that don't have any content associated with them, that are generated on the fly, and internally use a negative number. The only two namespaces like this are the Special: and Media: namespaces.