User:SimonTrew/UP

For usernames in general, see Wikipedia:Username (WP:USERNAME).

Wikipedia provides user pages to make it easy for everyone using it to talk to each other and help build the encyclopedia. Everyone has their own user page where they can talk with others and test changes knowing that they are not hurting other readers. There is a fixed way to get to your user page:

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). These are pages you have made yourself (see User_page#How_do_I_create_a_user_subpage).
• Your user space is the collection of everything in this list.

The Special:Mypage will take you to your own user page, and Special:Mytalk to your own user talk page. Other people will not be able to find your user page using Special:Mypage, they will only be able to get there by going to User:Example (if your name is Example).

You should not put details about yourself in the main namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content. If you have an entry because you are notable, you can change its facts if they are wrong but should not add or delete things simply because you like them or not.

If do not want a user page, the bet way is to use redirect to make it go straight to your user talk page. This helps other editors.

What can I have on my user page?

To start with, you might include a userpage notice. The text "{{userpage}}" will make a tag which looks something like the one below. You do not have to but it can be helpful, especially for readers new to Wikipedia who might be confused about what a personal page is doing in an encyclopedia.

This is a  Simple English Wikipedia user page. If you find this page on a site that is not  Wikipedia, you are seeing a version that was copied from there. It may be old and the person who you think made the page may not know it is on that site. The original page is here.

Use your user page for anything that to help the Wikipedia project. It is a mistake to think of it as a place to put anything you want: Wikipedia is not a blog, webspace provider, or social networking site. Think of it as a way of organizing the work that you are doing on the articles in Wikipedia, without hurting other readers who just want to read them and not edit them, and also as a way of helping other editors to help make the articles better and to get to know how you work.

Some people add information about themselves as well, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), a photograph, their real name, where they live, what they are best at, what they like and dislike, their homepages, and so forth. If you worry about privacy, you may not want to and you never have to.

You can use your user page to help youreself use Wikipedia better: to list "to do" information, works in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It is also good for experimenting in a (sandbox).

Lots of people use it to let others know what they have been doing on Wikipedia, and to say what they think about Wikipedia (which would not be allowed in the encyclopedia itself). So you might include current plans, a list of what you have been doing on Wikipedia, and your (constructive) opinions on how Wikipedia articles or policies that interest you should be changed. If you won't be editing Wikipedia for a while, add a note on your user page to say that, so others do not expect a quick reply.

You might want to add quotations that you like, or a picture, or some of your favorite Wikipedia articles or images (make sure you are allowed to use them; see the What can I not have on my user page section below), and other things like that.

Other people can edit your user page, maybe to award you a barnstar or leave other images for you. If your editing is revoked, a notice of this may be placed on your user page.

If you want to dual-license your contributions to others or declare them all public domain, you can put a notice saying so on your user page. Because after a while this can become a long list of templates and categories, some editors move the license templates to a subpage (see below). But whether you include an explicit license statement or not, all of your edits on Wikipedia are also licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

You may include any number of Wikipedian categories, for example Category:Wikipedian musicians. Wikipedian categories are meant to help others with the same interests to get together and talk. They are similar in some ways to Wikiprojects, but are very informal. Wikipedian categories should not overlap with article categories, which aim to put articles together to make it easier to search them, both by people and automatic tools that make, for example, contents pages and links for other sites. You must include the word "Wikipedian" in these category names. Also, they should be categories within the general Wikipedian category. See also: Wikipedia:User categorisation. Many users include mentions of the languages they know (see Wikipedia:Babel).

<!- have no idea what this means. What is "exist in userspace"? Userspace was defined above I know. This just makes no sense without a definition of what a namespace is, which IMO is beyond what this article should be doing

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 Wikipedia, what their interests are, their political and religious beliefs, etc. Some userboxes also exist in user space, and a directory of them can be found here. -->

You can include a link to your personal home page, but it should be plain and not an advertisement.

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 can have on any other page in your userspace.

Examples:

• A work in progress, until you are ready to put it in the main encyclopedia (you rarely need to do this, but some people prefer to)
• 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, for example 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 Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not a place just to put anything, so your user page is not a personal homepage. Your page is about you as a Wikipedian. Examples of content that is not related to Wikipedia might include:

• A weblog relating what you do when not using Wikipedia
• Talk that is not related to Wikipedia itself or articles on it
• Too much personal information (more than a couple of pages) which are not related to Wikipedia
• Lots of personal opinions on things that are not about Wikipedia, wiki philosophy, working together, free content, the Creative Commons, etc.
• Any other material that is nothing to do with an encyclopedia
• Polemical statements:

“

libelling people on userpages is a bad idea, and in fact, using userpages to attack people or campaign for or against anything or anyone is a bad idea

”

- Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia co-founder

• Games and other fun that are not related to "writing an encyclopedia," particularly if they involve people who do not help in the project. (cite as WP:UP#Games) (compare Category:Wikipedia games and Category:Wikipedia Word Association.)
• Talking with people not involved with the project
• Images which you are not free to use (see below)

In general, if you have material that you do not want others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for Wikipedia, it should not be on Wikipedia. Many free and low-cost web hosting, email, and weblog services are widely available, and are a good alternative for content that is not suitable for Wikipedia. You might also want to consider Wikia.

The Wikipedia community is generally tolerant and thinks of these guidelines as common sense not written in stone, especially with regular participants. Particularly, if someone is trying to set up a community it may, with a strict interpretation of the rules, be wrong, but Wikipedians understand that sometimes things will be a little wrong as they are being built, especially if started by a committed Wikipedian who has a good history of editing.

At their best, these activities help us build the community and the encyclopedia. But at the same time, the community will not accept users who put content on pages, including those in their user space, to disrupt these tasks.

Redirecting your user page (except to your talk page or a subpage of your userpage) is disliked by some people. It 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 pages in your userspace, into categories used by Wikipedia articles. This includes including articles you are working on. Be careful to watch 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: [[:Category:Bridges]]. This makes it an ordinary link. Templates and stub notices can be turned into links by putting tl|— "tl followed by a pipe character (|)— in front of their names, like this: {{tl|stub}}

Copies of other pages

Userpages and subpages can be used to make and try out new content, but this space is not intended to keep your preferred or disputed version of a page forever. In other words, Wikipedia is not a free web host. Copies of pages that are being kept just because they can be may suffer deletion.

Similarly, you should not design pages in userspace to be used instead of articles or Wikipedia space pages. If you find that a subpage of yours has become as useful as a normal page or project page, consider moving it or merging it with other similar pages that are already there. You should never make links from a mainspace article to any userpage, nor should an essay in a userspace be used as the main thing to support a Wikipedia policy, guideline, practice, or concept.

Images on user pages

Please do not include non-free images (images uploaded to Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia:Non-free content 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 Wikipedia article, deleted entirely).

What is discouraged on my user page?

Claiming you have qualifications you do not have

• The Wikipedia community dislikes users who lie about their schooling or other professional exams on their user page.

Simulated MediaWiki interfaces

<<User:SimonTrew 2009-03-25 I have left the comment above in normal english not simple english-->

• The Wikipedia community generally dislikes making other software that looks like MediaWiki, and you should not do it.

Inappropriate content

There is broad agreement that you may not put in your user space anything that is likely to damage the reputation of the project or give offence to many people. Wikipedia is not a soapbox is usually applied to user space as well as the encyclopaedia itself. You can do more in user space than in other spaces, but remember: don't be a dick about it.

Ownership and editing of pages in the user space

As a tradition, Wikipedia as much as possible lets you manage your user space to suit yourself (within reason). But pages in user space still do belong to the community:

• Anything you write is licensed under the GFDL, just as normal pages are.
• Other users can edit pages in your user space, although by tradition your user page will usually not be edited by others.
• Community policies, including Wikipedia:No personal attacks, work for your user space in the same way as they do for the rest of Wikipedia. Policies about what you can put inpages— such as WP:OR— generally do not.
• Sometimes, things that do not further the goals of Wikipedia can be removed (see below), as well as changes made by banned users.

It is considered polite to avoid changing someone else's user page without their permission, except for obvious small changes like fixing your own mistake before it has been replied to. Some users do not mind their user pages being edited, and may even say so on their page. Others may not like it and ask you not to edit their user pages, and it is probably sensible to respect their requests. The best option is instead to draw their attention to your problem on their talk page and let them edit their user page themselves if they agree. Sometimes a more experienced editor may make an edit to your userpage that goes beyond this, in which case the editor should leave an explanation on your talk page. They should not do any of this without thinking carefully.

Policy does not prohibit users from removing comments from their own talk pages, though archiving is preferred. Please note, though, that the removal of good-faith warnings, even though permitted, is often frowned upon.

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?

In all namespaces except for the article namespace (where articles are created), it is possible to create a subpage of a "parent" page. So if a page is called "PAGE", a subpage of "PAGE" with the name "SUBPAGE" would be located at "PAGE/SUBPAGE".

User:Example/Lipsum is an example of a user subpage for User:Example. Your user page, if it exists yet, is here. If you wanted to create a user subpage called "Sandbox", you would find it here.

New editors and experienced Wikipedians can use subpages to their user page to develop templates and articles, test wikitext markup, and create new articles before moving them to the main Wikipedia space.

There are several common uses for user subpages:

1. To place user page-appropriate content on a separate page in order to avoid having a large user page or merely not to conspicuously display it (for example, an awards page).
2. To plan large changes to articles, new articles, or allow Wikipedians to draft graphical layout overhauls.
3. To delineate views on Wikipedia, its functioning, or behavior of Wikipedians in general.
4. To test wikimarkup or LaTeX. User pages and user subpages can be transcluded and substituted, so they behave like templates, and can be tested as such. Pages meant for arbitrary testing are called sandboxes; there is a sandbox for general testing, but not for long-term development.

To link to a user subpage called "Sandbox" from your main user page, place the text

[[/Sandbox]]

On your page, or use a piped link with the same source. Make sure to experiment on your user page, not on this page! 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 what you write (by tagging the page with {{db-author}}). If your user page does not have a subpage named "Sandbox", the link will appear to be red, indicating that 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.

Sandboxes are useful for testing changes to pages, but once you are sure of yourself regarding an edit, you can just click on the "Show preview" button, and proof-read thoroughly. 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 request the deletion of any of your user subpages (or possibly your user page) by adding {{qd|U1}} to the top of 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 Wikipedia: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: {{QD|U1}}. 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 Wikipedia: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 Wikipedia can also click "User contributions" (in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page) to see what contributions you have made at Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia:Emailing users.

Old IP talk pages

Talk pages of anonymous users may be blanked or deleted as part of routine housekeeping if they meet the following criteria:

1. Never been blocked
2. Not using any unsubstituted templates (e.g., {{SharedIPEDU}})
3. No edits within the last year
4. No talk page activity within the last year
5. No incoming links to the page

Footnotes

SimonTrew/UP