WikiPOBia:User page

From WikiPOBia

Current revision as of 20:36, 29 April 2008

WikiPOBia provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in the project. If your username is Jane Doe:

• Your user page is the page at User:Jane Doe
• Your user talk page is the page at User talk:Jane Doe
• Your user subpages, are pages of the form User:Jane Doe/blah or User talk:Jane Doe/blah.
• Your user space is the collection of all the above.

Details about yourself generally shouldn't go in the main WikiPOBia namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content.

What can I have on my user page?

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, other 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 WikiPOBia 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 WikiPOBia:Sandbox).

Another use is to let people know about your activities and opinions on WikiPOBia. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on WikiPOBia, and your opinions on how certain WikiPOBia articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing WikiPOBia for a while, drop a note on your user page to that effect.

You might want to add quotes that you like or some of your favorite WikiPOBia articles or images, or something like that. In the unlikely event that your editing privileges on WikiPOBia 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.

In general, avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission, but feel free to correct typos and other mistakes. However, some users are fine with their user pages being edited, and may even have a note to that effect. Alternatively, if users ask you not to edit their user pages, it is probably best to respect their requests.

Generally, you should avoid any substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to WikiPOBia. WikiPOBia is not a general hosting service. Your page is about you as a WikiPOBian.

You may include one or more WikiPOBian categories, such as Category:WikiPOBian musicians. WikiPOBian categories are intended to help WikiPOBians with similar broad interests to congregate and converse. They have some similarity to Wikiprojects, but are much less formal. WikiPOBian categories should not overlap with article categories. It is important to include the word "WikiPOBian" in such category names. Also, they should be categories with the general WikiPOBian category.

What can I have on my user talk page?

Your user talk page is for other users to discuss matters related to WikiPOBia with you. As your user talk page approaches 32K, you may delete, archive, or summarise old discussion, as you feel appropriate. Please avoid deleting discussion merely because it is critical of your actions - doing so will only make people repeat the same criticism, and will make you seem like you are ignoring criticism.

In general, your contributions to your user talk page should be in response to other people's comments - avoid stuff that would be better placed on your user page.

What about user subpages?

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.

What should I avoid?

Generally, you should avoid any substantial content that is unrelated to WikiPOBia. Examples include:

• A web-blog relating your non-WikiPOBia activities
• Discussion not related to WikiPOBia
• Excessive personal information (more than a couple of pages)
• Opinion pieces not related to WikiPOBia or other non-encyclopedic material
• Games, roleplaying sessions, and other things that fall into "entertainment" rather than annotating the POB canon, particularly if they involve people who are not active participants in the project.
• Communications with people uninvolved with the project

Free and low-cost web hosting, email, and weblog services are widely available, and are a good alternative for content unrelated to WikiPOBia.

The WikiPOBia 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 WikiPOBians with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build the community, and this helps to build the WikiPOBia.

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.

Ownership and editing of pages in the user space

As a tradition, WikiPOBia 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 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, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for WikiPOBia, it should be placed on a personal web site. Many free and low-cost web hosting services are available to serve such needs.

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. Protected pages in user space should be listed at WikiPOBia:Protected page along with the rationale for protection.

Most user page vandalism occurs in retaliation for an administrator's efforts to dealing with vandalism. Administrators may protect their own user pages when appropriate, and are permitted to edit protected pages in user space. In rare cases a non-administrator's user page may be the target of vandalism. Such pages should be listed at WikiPOBia:Requests for page protection and may then be protected by an administrator.

Vandalism of talk pages is less common. Usually such vandalism should merely be reverted. 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 practicable.

Removal

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. Please do not recreate content deleted in this way: doing so is grounds for immediate re-deletion. Instead, please respect our judgement about what is and is not appropriate.

How do I delete my user subpages?

If you don't want the hassle below, just replace your user subpage with a redirect to your user page. This is normally sufficient for most people's needs.

Unless you are a sysop, it is not possible to delete your own subpages. If you are a sysop, it is recommended that you also list your pages there so they can be deleted by another sysop.

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 or talk page be deleted. Most frequently, this occurs when a long-term contributor decides to leave.

The user page should be listed on WikiPOBia:Speedy deletions, along with 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 etc 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. Sysops have the technical capability to do this themselves but must still request another sysop does this, rather than use that technical capability.

User pages that have been deleted can be recreated with a blank page.

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 WikiPOBia can also, at the bottom of the page (or in the sidebar), click "User contributions" to see what contributions you have made at WikiPOBia over time.

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