Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by CBM (talk | contribs) at 13:32, 12 February 2007 (→Simulated MediaWiki interfaces: change one "may" to "should" - same meaning in practice, and most guidelines use "should" for instructions to users). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

This page documents an English Misplaced Pages ]. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on this guideline's talk page.

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WP:UP and WP:USER redirect here. For the undeletion policy, see Misplaced Pages:Undeletion policy (WP:UNDEL). For usernames in general, see Misplaced Pages:Username (WP:USERNAME).

Misplaced Pages provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in the project. If your username is Example:

• Your user page is the page at User:Example (or Special:Mypage)
• Your user talk page is the page at User talk:Example (or Special:Mytalk)
• Your user subpages are pages of the form User:Example/Lipsum (Special:Mypage/Lipsum) or User talk:Example/Lipsum (Special:Mytalk/Lipsum).
• Your user space is the collection of all the above.

The Special:Mypage and Special:Mytalk special pages will take each user to her or his own user and user talk pages, respectively. Others will not be able to find your user page using Special:Mypage, they will be able to visit it only by going to User:Example (for the example user).

Details about you generally should not go in the main namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content.

If you would prefer not to have a user page, then it is recommended that you redirect it to your user talk page for the convenience of other editors.

What can I have on my user page?

To start with, you might include a userpage notice. The text "{{userpage}}" will generate a tag which looks something like the one below. This is by no means a requirement but it can be helpful, especially for viewers new to Misplaced Pages who might be confused about what a personal page is doing on an encyclopedia.

This is a Misplaced Pages user page. This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Misplaced Pages, you are viewing a mirror site. Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Misplaced Pages itself. The original page is located at .

Your userpage is for anything that is compatible with the Misplaced Pages project. It is a mistake to think of it as a homepage: Misplaced Pages is not a blog, webspace provider, or social networking site. Instead, think of it as a way of organizing the work that you are doing on the articles in Misplaced Pages, and also a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they're working.

Some people add information about themselves as well, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), a photograph, their real name, their location, information about their areas of expertise and interest, likes and dislikes, homepages, and so forth. (NB: If you are concerned with privacy, you may not want to emulate this.)

You can use your user page to help you to use Misplaced Pages more effectively: to list "to do" information, works in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It's also good for experimenting with markup (that is, as a personal sandbox).

Another common use is to let people know about your activities on Misplaced Pages, and your opinions about Misplaced Pages. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on Misplaced Pages, and your (constructive) opinions on how certain Misplaced Pages articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing Misplaced Pages for a while, drop a note on your user page to that effect.

You might want to add quotations that you like, or a picture, or some of your favorite Misplaced Pages articles or images (freely licensed only – see the What can I not have on my user page section below), or the like.

Others may also edit your user page, for instance awarding you a barnstar or leaving other images for you. In the event that your editing privileges on Misplaced Pages are revoked, a notice of this may be placed on your user page.

If you want to dual-license your contributions under an additional license or declare them all public domain, you may put a notice to this effect on your user page. Because of the large templates and long category names, some editors move the license templates to a subpage (see below). Whether you include an explicit license statement or not, however, all of your edits on Misplaced Pages are also licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

You may include one or more Wikipedian categories, such as Category:Wikipedian musicians. Wikipedian categories are intended to help Wikipedians with similar broad interests to congregate and converse. They have some similarity to Wikiprojects, but are much less formal. Wikipedian categories should not overlap with article categories. It is important to include the word "Wikipedian" in such category names. Also, they should be categories within the general Wikipedian category. See also: Misplaced Pages:User categorisation. Many users include mentions of the languages they know (see Misplaced Pages:Babel).

Many users like to insert userboxes into their user pages. These are similar to the Babel templates but are usually more about what users do on Misplaced Pages, what their interests are, their political and religious beliefs, etc. Note that some userboxes also exist in user space, and a directory of them can be found here.

You are welcome to include a link to your personal home page, although you should not surround it with any promotional language.

Note: user pages are often reached through user signatures on talk pages.

What about user subpages?

If you need more pages, you can create subpages. More or less, you can have anything here that you might have on your user or user talk page.

Examples:

• A work in progress, until it is ready to be released (this is typically not necessary, though some people do this)
• Archives of user talk
• Tests; for testing a template, make it a separate subpage.
• Sections of the main page that are big enough to require their own page, e.g. a page of awards you have received or pictures you have taken.
• A userbox which can be used by other users.

What can I not have on my user page?

Generally, you should avoid substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages is not a general hosting service, so your user page is not a personal homepage. Your page is about you as a Wikipedian. Examples of unrelated content include:

• A weblog relating your non-Misplaced Pages activities
• Extensive discussion not related to Misplaced Pages
• Excessive personal information (more than a couple of pages) unrelated to Misplaced Pages
• Extensive personal opinions on matters unrelated to Misplaced Pages, wiki philosophy, collaboration, free content, the Creative Commons, etc.
• Other non-encyclopedic material
• Polemical statements:

- Jimbo Wales, Misplaced Pages founder and leader

• Games, roleplaying sessions, and other things pertaining to "entertainment" rather than "writing an encyclopedia," particularly if they involve people who are not active participants in the project
• Communications with people uninvolved with the project or related work
• Images which you are not free to use (see below)

In general, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for Misplaced Pages, it should be placed on a personal web site. Many free and low-cost web hosting, email, and weblog services are widely available, and are a good alternative for content unrelated to Misplaced Pages. You might also want to consider Wikia for wiki-style community collaboration.

The Misplaced Pages community is generally tolerant and offers fairly wide latitude in applying these guidelines to regular participants. Particularly, community-building activities that are not strictly "on topic" may be allowed, especially when initiated by committed Wikipedians with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build the community, and this helps to build the encyclopedia. But at the same time, if user page activity becomes disruptive to the community or gets in the way of the task of building an encyclopedia, it must be modified to prevent disruption.

Redirecting your userpage to another page (other than your talk page or a subpage of your user page) is frowned on by some people. Doing so makes it difficult to follow links to your userpage and thus to leave you messages or to look at your contributions. The exception, of course, is if you redirect the userpage for an older account of yours to the userpage of your current account.

Do not put your userpage or subpages, including work-in-progress articles, into categories used by Misplaced Pages articles. Be careful of templates and stub notices that put a work-in-progress article into categories. You can "quote" categories by adding a colon before "Category", like this: ]. This turns it into an ordinary link. Templates and stub notices can be turned into links to themselves by putting tl| ("tl" followed by a pipe character) in front of their names, like this: {{tl|stub}}

Images on user pages

Please do not include non-free images (images uploaded to Misplaced Pages without the permission of the copyright owner, or under licenses that do not permit commercial use) on your user page or on any subpage thereof (this is official policy and the usual wide user page latitude does not apply, see Misplaced Pages:Fair use criteria for details). Non-free images found on a user page (including user talk pages) may be removed (preferably by replacing it with a link to the image) from that page without warning (and, if not used in a Misplaced Pages article, deleted entirely).

Simulated MediaWiki interfaces

Please do not put fake versions of the MediaWiki user interface elements, such as a fake "you have new messages" box or fake category links, on your user page or user talk page. Because these fake elements are difficult to distinguish from the actual MediaWiki interface, they undermine trust and carry the appearance of fraud. Fake MediaWiki UI elements may be removed without warning and should not be replaced once removed.

Ownership and editing of pages in the user space

As a tradition, Misplaced Pages offers wide latitude to users to manage their user space as they see fit. However, pages in user space still do belong to the community:

• Contributions must be licensed under the GFDL, just as articles are.
• Other users may edit pages in your user space, although by convention your user page will usually not be edited by others.
• Community policies, including Misplaced Pages:No personal attacks, apply to your user space just as they do elsewhere. Article content policies such as WP:OR generally do not.
• In some cases, material that does not somehow further the goals of the project may be removed (see below), as well as edits from banned users.

In general it is considered polite to avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission. Some users are fine with their user pages being edited, and may even have a note to that effect. Other users may object and ask you not to edit their user pages, and it is probably sensible to respect their requests. The best option is to draw their attention to the matter on their talk page and let them edit their user page themselves if they agree on a need to do so. In some cases a more experienced editor may make a non-trivial edit to your userpage, in which case that editor should leave a note on your talk page explaining why this was done. This should not be done for trivial reasons.

On a user's own talk page, policy does not prohibit the removal of comments at that user's discretion, although archival is preferred to removal. Please note, though, that removing warnings from one's own talk page is often frowned upon.

Use of page protection for user pages

As with article pages, user pages are occasionally the targets of vandalism, or, more rarely, edit wars. When edit wars or vandalism persist, the affected page should be protected from editing. Protected pages in user space should be listed at Misplaced Pages:List of protected pages, along with the rationale for protection.

Most user page vandalism occurs in retaliation for an administrator's efforts to deal with vandalism. Administrators may protect their own user pages when appropriate, and are permitted to edit protected pages in user space. Sometimes a non-administrator's user page may be the target of vandalism. Such pages should be listed at Misplaced Pages:Requests for page protection and may then be protected by an administrator.

Note that repeatedly inserting copyrighted content on your own user page after being notified that doing so violates our policy is also considered vandalism, and may result in it being protected.

Vandalism of talk pages is less common. Usually such vandalism should merely be reverted. Blocks should be used for repeated vandalism of talk pages, where policy permits. In rare cases, protection may be used but is considered a last resort given the importance of talk page discussions to the project.

Protected pages in user space should be unprotected as soon as practical.

Removal

If the community lets you know that they would rather you delete some content from your user space, you should consider doing so - such content is only permitted with the consent of the community. After you've been here for a while, and written lots of great articles, the community may be more inclined to let you "get away with it". Alternatively, you could move the content to another site, and link to it.

If you do not cooperate, the inappropriate content will eventually be removed, either by editing the page (if only part of it is inappropriate), or by redirecting it to your main user page (if it is entirely inappropriate).

In excessive cases, your user subpage may be deleted, following a listing on Miscellany for deletion, subject to deletion policy.

How do I create a user subpage?

New users are encouraged to develop their edits in a sandbox, also known as a user subpage, but subpages are also used by experienced editors developing new articles or working on a major revision to an existing article. You can make a user subpage by just putting ] on your userpage (NOT on this page). Go to your userpage first, click "edit this page", then type ], save, then click the red link, draft1, after you save the page. "Draft 1" was used in this example, but you can pick a name corresponding to the type of subpage you have, for example, a personal sandbox would be /Sandbox. DO NOT forget the first forward slash or you will put the page in the main namespace as a regular article and will have to ask for speedy deletion if you save anything you write. A red link means a page has no content and if you just navigate away without saving any content the page will not be created and there is nothing to delete. Copy the source for the article you want to edit to your sandbox and perfect your edits there. Be careful when going back to the article that you do not inadvertently revert edits subsequent to your copying the page. Once you are more experienced you can forsake the sandbox for smaller edits and edit directly in the article remembering, of course, to proof-read thoroughly using "show preview" before saving the page. If you need help creating a user subpage, you can get assistance at WP:UPH.

How do I delete a user subpage?

You can easily get any of your user subpages deleted by adding {{db-owner}} to the page.

Alternatively, you might consider simply making the page redirect to your user page. This is normally sufficient for most people's needs. There may however be a reason for the page to be kept.

Only tag for deletion your own personal pages, and only if you have a genuine reason for requesting a personal subpage of yours be deleted.

Pages which have formerly been in a different namespace and moved to a subpage of the user namespace may not be deleted in this way. These must be listed either at Articles for deletion, or if they were not found originally in the article namespace, at Miscellany for deletion. On the other hand, if you'd just like them to be moved back, then by all means ask at Misplaced Pages:Requested moves.

How do I delete my user and user talk pages?

Where there is no significant abuse and no administrative need to retain the personal information, you can request that your own user page and user subpages be deleted. Most frequently, this occurs when a longterm contributor decides to leave.

Just add to the page: {{db-userreq}}. A sysop will then delete it after checking that the page does not contain evidence of policy violations that may need to be kept. If there has been no disruptive behavior meriting the retention of that personal information, then the sysop can delete the page straight away in order to eliminate general public distribution of the history containing the information. If the deletion occurs immediately, others may request undeletion if they feel there was in fact a need to retain the page. In such a case, the page should be undeleted and listed on Miscellany for deletion for a period of five days following the deletion of the user page. If a user page was deleted because a contributor left, it may be restored by a sysop if the contributor returns, particularly if the history contains evidence of policy violations.

As a matter of practice user talk pages are generally not deleted, barring legal threats or other grievous violations that have to be removed for legal reasons; however, exceptions to this can be and are made on occasion for good reason (see also Right to vanish).

User pages that have been deleted can be recreated with a blank page, or a link to Misplaced Pages:Missing Wikipedians to avoid red links pointing to them.

What other information is accessible to others from my user page?

In addition to the usual information accessible from an article page such as page history, "Discuss this page" and the like, other users at Misplaced Pages can also click "User contributions" (in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page) to see what contributions you have made at Misplaced Pages over time. See MediaWiki User's Guide: User contributions page for more. Please note that having your user page deleted does not delete this list of your contributions.

Visitors to your user page can also click "E-mail this user" if you have opted in your user preferences to be able to send and receive email. See Misplaced Pages:Emailing users.

Footnotes

1. Jimbo's comment on libel on userpages

See also

• User page design
• Misplaced Pages:WikiProject User Page Help

• Misplaced Pages features
• Wikipedians
• Misplaced Pages guidelines