Misplaced Pages

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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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This page in a nutshell: Sign all your posts on Misplaced Pages talk pages by typing ~~~~ to be accountable and to help others understand the conversation.

Signing your posts on talk pages and other discourse (but not on articles) is good etiquette. Discussion is an important part of collborative editing as it helps other users to understand the progress and evolution of a work and signatures allow people to easily identify the author of a comment.

Because of this, the developers created an easy way to create signatures. All you need to do is append your posts with ~~~~. Editors with the edit toolbar option enabled under Special:Preferences can click the signature icon () located at the top of edit boxes to add the four tildes.

The purpose of the signature

Signing edits in discussion enables other editors to recognise the username or IP of the person who made a statement and the time at which it was made. You should ensure that your signature does this and append the signature to all discussion edits you make.

Appending your signature

The following is a list of all the signature options. The examples reflect how your signature might appear if you have not customized it.

If you choose to contribute to Misplaced Pages without logging in, your IP address will take the place of the username. Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. (A pseudonymous account actually provides you with more protection of your identity, if you are concerned about IP privacy issues.)

Customizing your signature

Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Nickname". The software automatically places ] around the text entered in this field, so that whatever nickname you choose to use as a signature will be linked to your user page. Although not a policy, it is common practice (and common courtesy) to use a signature name that is either identical or closely related to your account name, or your real name. Likewise, signatures that obscure your account name to the casual reader may be seen as disruptive.

If you want to use a more complex signature (for instance, including your own Wiki markup and HTML markup), you can choose the "Raw signatures (without automatic link)" checkbox in your Preferences. Just fill the "Your nickname" field with your desired signature, exactly as you want it to be substituted for the tildes. Be aware that even the raw signatures option treats markup very strictly, and some markup which works in normal pages will not work in signatures — see Misplaced Pages:How to fix your signature if you are having problems.

To learn more about how to make complex signatures, see Misplaced Pages:Tip of the day/June 30, 2006.

Important Considerations

A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature affects other users. It can be disruptive to civil discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. In one case, a user who insisted on keeping an unsuitable signature was required to change it by the Arbitration Committee (See -Ril-'s arbitration case). When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind.

Images and Appearance

Images of any kind should not be used in signatures.

Many concerns have been raised over the use of images in signatures, and they are considered to serve no use to the encyclopedia project. Images in signatures should not be used for several reasons:

• They use unnecessary server resources, and could cause server slowdown.
• A new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks.
• They reduce searchability, making pages more difficult to read.
• They make it more difficult to copy text from a page,
• They are potentially distracting from the actual message.
• In most browsers images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without.
• They clutter up the file links list of the image every time you sign on a different talk page.

Your signature should not blink, or otherwise be designed to annoy other editors. Avoid markup such as <big> tags (which produce big text), or line breaks (<br /> tags), and be sparing with superscript or subscript.

Language and Alphabet

If your preferred signature consists of characters not in the latin alphabet (hànzì, for example), you are encouraged to include latin characters also. This is because characters not within the ASCII character set may not display properly for everyone.

Length

Please try to keep signatures short. Long signatures with lots of HTML/wiki markup can make page editing more difficult, making it harder for other editors to discern your comments from your code. A 300 character signature, for instance, is likely to be much larger than most of the comments to which it will be appended and this is likely to make discussions harder for everybody to participate in. Both images and long signatures carry the danger of giving undue prominence to a user's contribution. Reduce it to the minimum necessary.

Transclusion/template

Avoid using page transclusion, templates, or parser functions in signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example). These are avoidable drains on server resources. Transcluded signatures require extra processing. Whenever you do change your signature source, all talk pages you've posted on must be re-cached. One can imagine the impact if these kinds of signatures were in common use. If you really must use a userpage as a source of boilerplate for your signature, at least substitute it so it is only transcluded once, for example {{Subst:User:Name/sig}}.

Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems.

External links

Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Misplaced Pages. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page is usually viewed as 'linkspamming' or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines. Therefore, signatures must not include external links. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a good website that you are associated with, please do so on your user page.

Internal links

You may include a link to your talk page so that people who want to discuss something with you person-to-person. Beyond that, it is probably wise use internal links sparingly. If you find a particular Misplaced Pages page useful put it in your browser bookmarks, favorites list, or on your userpage--not your signature.

Dealing with unsigned comments

The template {{unsigned}} can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or ip to the comment.

The template {{unsigned2}} does almost the same as {{unsigned}} when used with two parameters, but the ordering of the parameters is reversed. This is useful for copying and pasting from the edit history, where the timestamp appears before the username. {{unsigned2}} also automatically adds the (UTC) at the end.

More about Talk pages

See Misplaced Pages:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.

• Misplaced Pages culture
• Misplaced Pages guidelines
• Misplaced Pages how-to