Wikipedia:User pages

This page documents an English Wikipedia content guideline.

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.

Shortcuts

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

For userboxes, see Wikipedia:Userboxes (WP:BOX).

Wikipedia provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in its project to build an encyclopedia.

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), and are listed at Special:Prefixindex/User:Example/ and Special:Prefixindex/User talk:Example/.
Your user space is the collection of all the above.

Note: "Your" in this context means associated with you, not belonging to you.

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 may 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 Wikipedia who might be confused about what a personal page is doing on an encyclopedia.

This is a Wikipedia user page.

This is not an encyclopedia article. If you find this page on any site other than Wikipedia, 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 Be aware that the page may be outdated and that the user this page belongs to may have no personal affiliation with any site other than Wikipedia itself. The original page is located at [automatically-generated http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:YourName link].

Your userpage is for anything that is compatible with the Wikipedia project. It is a mistake to think of it as a homepage as Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia, and also a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they are 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. (If you are concerned with privacy, you may not want to and are by no means required to emulate this.)

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

Another common use is to let people know about your activities on Wikipedia, and your opinions about Wikipedia. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on Wikipedia, and your (constructive) opinions on how certain Wikipedia articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia 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: Wikipedia:User categorisation. Many users include mentions of the languages they know (see Wikipedia: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 Wikipedia, 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 must I have on my userpage?

Shortcuts

Users with non-Latin usernames are welcome to edit in Wikipedia. However, non-Latin scripts (such as Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Hindu, Japanese, Korean, Thai and others) are illegible to most other contributors of the English Wikipedia. As a courtesy to the rest of the contributors, users with such usernames should register doppelganger (alternative) user accounts (using for example the translation or the transliteration of their username) and place redirects in the userpages of those accounts to their true, non-Latin userpage, include information about such redirects on the true userpage, and sign their posts (at least in part) with a Latin name. Such redirects should also be created for the user talkpage.

For example, see User:Παράδειγμα who is redirected from User:Paradigma and signs as Παράδειγμα/Paradigma.

In case a non-Latin username holder refuses to create such redirects, third users may create them at their discretion for ease in navigation.

What about user subpages?

Shortcut

WP:UP#SUB

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 your user 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.

Childood

Born on June 22, 1983 in Decatur, Georgia

Inappropriate content

There is broad agreement that you may not include in your user space material that is likely to bring the project into disrepute, or which is likely to give widespread offense. Wikipedia is not a soapbox is usually interpreted as applying to user space as well as the encyclopedia itself. You do have more latitude in user space than elsewhere, but remember: don't be a dick about it. Extremely offensive material may be removed on sight by any editor.

Ownership and editing of pages in the user space

As a tradition, Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia: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.

Removal of warnings

Policy does not prohibit users from removing comments from their own talk pages, although archiving is preferred. The removal of a warning is taken as evidence that the warning has been read by the user. Deleted warnings can still be found in the page history.

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.

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 Wikipedia: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 of inappropriate content

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 have 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.

What to do if you find someone else's user page being used inappropriately

If you are considering nominating a user page or personal image for deletion because it appears to be used as a personal web page or a blog, please be aware that many editors will consider this a personal attack on themselves, because they may believe they own "my userpage". Be very careful not to scare a newbie away from Wikipedia, and try to assume good faith that they are merely trying to share information about themselves. Try to resolve the issue on the user's talk page first. Also note that a limited amount of personal information (perhaps a short biography) and a freely licensed (never fair use) tasteful personal photograph or two are usually allowed on a user's page in order to show the user's human side, but only if the page complies with other Wikipedia policies. Users with most of their contribution edits outside their user space should be given more leeway in this regard than users whose edits consist solely or mostly of user space edits. And always remember that a user's user page being used as a personal web page is not in itself a speedy deletion criterion.

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:

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).
To plan large changes to articles, new articles, or allow Wikipedians to draft graphical layout overhauls.
To delineate views on Wikipedia, its functioning, or behavior of Wikipedians in general.
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 {{db-userreq}} 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 would 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: {{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 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.