Wikipedia:User pages

Anything that is compatible with the Wikipedia project.

A good start is to add a little information about yourself, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), a photograph, your real name, your location, information about your areas of expertise and interest, likes and dislikes, homepages, and so forth. Obviously, this will depend on how comfortable you are with respect to privacy.

You can also use your user page to help you use Wikipedia more effectively: so you can use it to list "to do" information, work in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It's also good for experimenting with markup (a personal Wikipedia:Sandbox)

Another use is to let people know about your activities and opinions on Wikipedia. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on Wikipedia, and your 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 quotes that you like, or a picture, or some of your favorite Wikipedia articles or images (free licensed only, see the #What can I not have on my user page? section below), or something like that. Also, someone may choose to award you a barnstar. In the unlikely 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, 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). All your edits on Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License already.

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 with the general Wikipedian category. See also: Wikipedia:User categorisation.

Note that the user pages are often reached through user signatures on talk pages.

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
• archives of user talk:
• tests; for testing a template, make it a separate subpage.

Generally, you should avoid substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Wikipedia. Wikipedia 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-Wikipedia activities
• Extensive discussion not related to Wikipedia
• Excessive personal information (more than a couple of pages)
• Opinion pieces not related to Wikipedia or other non-encyclopedic material
• Games, roleplaying sessions, and other things that fall into "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

In general, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for Wikipedia, 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 Wikipedia. You might also want to consider Wikicities for wiki-style community collaboration.

The Wikipedia community is fairly 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.

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 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:Fair use#Fair use policy 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).

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.
• In some cases, material that does not somehow further the goals of the project may be removed (see below).

In general it is considered polite to avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission, but feel free to correct typos and other mistakes. 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.

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 Wikipedia:Protected page 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 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 violate 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 repeat 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.

If the community lets you know that they'd rather you deleted some or other content from your user space, you should probably do so, at least for now - such content is only permitted with the consent of the community. After you've been here for a year or so, 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 co-operate, we will eventually simply remove inappropriate content, 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. Please do not recreate content deleted in this way: doing so is grounds for immediate re-deletion (see candidates for speedy deletion). Instead, please respect our judgement about what is and is not appropriate.

You can easily get any of your user subpages deleted by adding {{delete}} 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 Non-main namespace pages 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.

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

Just add to the page: {{deletebecause|the reason you need the page deleted}}. 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 and user talk page. If a user page and user talk page were 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.

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.

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, at the bottom of the page (or in the sidebar), click "User contributions" to see what contributions you have made at Wikipedia over time. See MediaWiki User's Guide: User contributions page for more.

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