Sign your posts on talk pages
From WushuWiki
It is proper Wikiquette to sign your posts on Talk pages. This is an essential aspect of communication here. It helps other users understand the progress and evolution of a dialog.
Because of this necessity, Wikipedia developers created a very easy way to create signatures. To automatically sign your posts with a date-stamp, add four tildes (~~~~) at the end of your message; or add three tildes (~~~) to add just your name. (In general, using the full date-stamp is preferred.) Some editors have a special key or menu selection for inserting a Wikipedia signature. (E.g., there is a Wikipedia extension available for the Mozilla Firefox browser which adds this and many other Wikipedia-specific functions to the right-click menu whenever you are editing a Wikipedia article.)
Here's a list of all the signature options:
| What you type | What will be stored | What shows on the page |
~~~
| [[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]]
| Kingturtle |
~~~~
| [[User:Kingturtle|Kingturtle]] 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)
| Kingturtle 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC) |
~~~~~
| 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC)
| 04:40, 10 Mar 2004 (UTC) |
If you chose to contribute to Wikipedia without logging in, the tildes will be converted to your IP address to be displayed as your signature. (An account actually provides you with more anonymity, if you are concerned about IP privacy issues.) You can also consider manually signing your posts with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon (although your IP address will still be stored in the page history if you edit without logging in).
If your preferred signature consists of non-ASCII characters (Chinese for example), you are encouraged to use ASCII characters in them as well. This is because not everyone can view certain characters, and instead may find a box or other replacement where the non-ASCII character would properly be.
Contents |
[edit] Customizing your signature
Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Nickname". The software automatically places "[[User:<yourusername>|" and "]]" around the text entered in this field, so that whatever nickname you choose to use as a signature will be linked to your user page. Although not a policy, it seems to be common practice (and common courtesy) to use a signature name that is either identical or closely related to your account name, or to use your real name.
[edit] Things to avoid
[edit] Appearance
It is possible to be playful with the signature, for example by including ornamental Unicode characters (☻♂♖♥★, etc.) and using <font> HTML tags to change the color and/or size.
Images in the signature are discouraged for several reasons:
- they use additional server resources
- they can reduce searchability and make it more difficult to copy text from a page
- they are potentially distracting from the actual message
- in most browsers, images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without.
Your signature should not blink, as this annoys many other editors.
[edit] Length
Please try to keep signatures short, because very long signatures cloud up the page source in edit mode, making it harder for other editors to find where your comment stopped. Both images and long signatures carry the danger of giving undue prominence to that user's contribution. Reduce it to the minimum necessary.
