Wikipedia:Talk pages

A talk page is a special Wikipedia page containing discussion about the contents of its associated "subject" page. To view the talk page of an article, click on the "Talk page" link in the sidebar or at the bottom of the screen. When you are in the talk page, clicking on "Subject page" will take you back to the main article.

On Wikipedia, the primary purpose of a talk page (sometimes referred to as a /Talk page because of the way the old software used to work) is to help to improve the contents of the main page, from an encyclopedic point of view. Questions, challenges, excised text (due to truly egregious confusion or bias, for example), arguments relevant to changing the text, and commentary on the main page is all fair play.

Your user page has a talk page as well, and that one has some special features. For one thing, there is a link to it in the header next to your name (if you use a "skin" other than the default it may be somewhere else). Also, if edits are made to it by others, an asterisk (*) will appear next to the link to notify you. These pages can be used for occasional personal communication among users; but note that these pages are public. If you want to communicate privately, use e-mail.

It seems safe to say that most Wikipedians generally oppose the use of talk pages just for the purpose of partisan talk about the main subject. Wikipedia is not a dicussion forum, it's an encyclopedia. It also seems safe to say that most Wikipedians would regard some partisan wrangling as fine, if in some fairly clear way it will lead to the improvement of the article. Some other Wikipedians disagree, believing that we should all feel free to write whatever we like on the topic of the page to which the talk page is appended.

Generally speaking, when a talk page's contents become extremely large, particularly if they are outdated, they should be refactored. See editing policy.

A few community standards do apply to talk pages: for example, comments grow by adding text to the bottom of the existing discussion, so readers can follow the discussion chronologically. Unlike the articles themselves, comments on talk pages are often signed by their author. The software even makes that easy by letting you type three or four tilde characters (~, often in the upper-left corner of your keyboard), which will be turned into your user name if you are logged in (four tildes will produce your name and the date). There is also a "nickname" feature in your user preferences for customizing this signature.

Often the talk pages of controversial topics can be very heavily used. See for example Talk:Abortion, Talk:Capitalism, Talk:Socialism, Talk:Jesus Christ.

Archiving

Ensure that discussion of the issue in discusison has died down and no one has a reasonable chance of adding to it. Then create a new page. (See Wikipedia:How to start a page for details.) Place the page in a talk or wikipedia namespace. Give it an explanatory name. Often people simply add "archive" to the original name. Explain on the archive page where the text you plan to archive will come from and provide a link. Cut the relavent content from the original page and paste it into the new page. Replace the text on the original page with a link to the archive.