If you have a username, you have a user page in the form of [[User:Yourusername]]. Here you can post information about yourself for the benefit of other editors, as well as notes for yourself (for example, a list of the project pages that you often use). Note that a user page is not meant to be a personal web page: Wikipedia is not MySpace. Wikipedia has a few commonsense guidelines for user pages, as noted here; otherwise, you are free to post whatever you wish.
If you never edit your user page, it will show up as a redlink. Although this is respected (to an extent), not editing your user page will not inspire confidence in your commitment to Wikipedia. Adding at least some information to your user page is recommended. For users who really don't want a user page, one option is to redirect their user page to their user talk page (at [[user_talk:yourusername]]). This means when you sign messages on talk pages your username will show up as a bluelink, but people clicking it will be directed to your talk page to leave a message instead.
The content you add to your user page is up to you. Listing your interests and areas of expertise is certainly helpful—or at least what you're interested in working on in Wikipedia. Inform other editors, for instance, if your edits are in an area that you are knowledgeable about or just consider a hobby. This will help other like-minded editors find you. You can also list what you've done on the site on your user page: articles you've written or worked on, for instance. This kind of brag sheet not only helps you keep track of what you've done but also shows others what you've accomplished and where your main editing interests lie. Pride in your work as shown on your user page is not misplaced!
Many editors also list the languages they speak—a courteous gesture for an international project. If you are multilingual, your help with translations may be requested. Wikipedia has a series of standardized language templates for just this purpose. They contain the language code (such as en or fr) and a number from 1 to 4 and then native. The numbers indicate proficiency: 1 means you're a beginning learner, whereas native indicates that this language is your mother tongue. These language templates can be found at [[Wikipedia:Babel]] (shortcut WP:BABEL).
The way of the Wikipedian is to value spontaneity on the site, not formality. When you post any serious amount of information on your user page, though, you should adopt a thoughtful approach. Keep these three concepts in mind: privacy, which we've already mentioned; authority, which we discussed at length in Chapter 2; and neutrality.
The authors of this book happily use their real names on Wikipedia—and you can immediately discover this from Google. Anything posted on Wikipedia may become very public, and if you use your real name, your user page may start to climb up the Google hits on your name. Keep this in mind if you add a photo, your location, or any other identifiable information about yourself, particularly if you don't want your identity on Wikipedia linked to other online presences or public roles you may have. Just to drive this point home, a search for Charles Matthews—a fairly common name—now leads directly to one author's very own user page in the top few search engine hits. Furthermore, if you're interested in getting involved in the administrative side of the site, that may involve controversy. Any disclosure may attract online stalkers; in a few cases, the antagonists of administrators have tracked down real-life information such as phone numbers. This is unlikely to happen unless you're engaged in controversial actions; however, as with any online forum, this possibility is a genuine concern. Wikipedia itself can do very little in such cases.
Qualifications in academic areas add to an editor's reputation. Should you mention this qualification on your user page? Listing a doctorate in art history will not make you immediately identifiable. It also should not buttress your art history edits against those who think they have identified mistakes; however, those who don't trust your edits to art articles will probably be more likely to check their own facts before inserting their corrections. Many editors view editing Wikipedia as a professional activity, no less important than working on another encyclopedia or scholarly work that merits the respect of others. If you're known in your field or recognized as an expert, about the only way to prove it is to use your real name as a username, and use a professional tone on your user page. You can use a pseudonym to reduce your real name's prominence, but make no secret of your real name on your user page.
A different set of considerations comes into play when you consider posting your affiliations, say political or religious, the company you work for, or any activism you pursue. This can be seen as declaring an interest before editing in some of the more contentious areas. If you do this, your edits will be under more intense scrutiny by other editors for strict neutrality. Self-knowledge helps here. If despite having a commitment to a political party, you really can be neutral in editing political articles, then your reputation as a good editor will grow. If, however, you really cannot be neutral about the company you work for (and many people would find that hard), then if you do edit the article about this company, your declaration may make matters worse. However, fair-minded folk will always give you some credit for honesty, even if you're a declared partisan.
Wikipedia has some limitations on what you can post to your user page. The guideline is at [[Wikipedia:User page]] (shortcut WP:UP). You can't, for example, use your user page for blogging, for an activist campaign, or in other ways that simply treat it as free web space. User pages are meant to help the community of Wikipedia editors, and using them in a combative fashion (a blacklist of users you dislike, for example) is a mistake.
Your user page is also not the right place to raise grievances, for the good reason that others are not entitled to reply to you there (though they may leave messages on your user talk page). By convention, no one else should edit your user page without your invitation, though obvious vandalism to it may be reverted by others.
These guidelines apply to the user space in general, including subpages. In commonsense terms, these guidelines mean that anything for the benefit of the project can be posted; nothing else should be.
With a user page comes a user talk page. This is where other people can leave you messages about your work, articles that you are working on, and so on. A typical user talk page accumulates notes and questions from other editors about article content, ongoing projects, and contributions; notifications from WikiProjects the user belongs to; and occasional complaints and holiday greetings. Early messages on your user talk page may well be automated or created by templates. Please don't take this as typical of Wikipedia: Human interaction is valued. General interaction on talk pages, which are a very important part of social life on Wikipedia, will be described further in Chapter 12, but the basic rule play nice applies here as elsewhere.
Note
If you have a specific problem but don't yet know where to go on the site to get an answer, you can add the {{helpme}} template to your user talk page. You should get a response on your talk page from an active editor.
Most user talk pages use a conventional simple structure, where each message is left as a new section (with two equal signs, ==, around the message title to produce the section header). New messages are added at the bottom. If a conversation produces several back-and-forth replies, any further comments should be indented for readability to produce a threaded discussion, as on article talk pages. Finally, all messages should be signed with four tildes (~~~~) to insert the commenter's username and the date. As described in "Talk Pages" on Reading and Contributing to Talk Pages, whenever you receive a message on your talk page, the next time you log in an orange notification box (see Figure 4-6) will automatically pop up to let you know (this goes away when you "check your messages" by going to your talk page).
You are entitled to keep your user talk page tidy: If you get lots of messages, archive the page periodically to a subpage (see the description of user subpages in "Drafting the Article" on Drafting the Article and directions at [[Wikipedia:User page]]). While ignoring any annoying messages left on your talk page is best, you can also remove them, though removing legitimate discussions about content is generally not a good idea.
If you have a question or comment for another user, feel free to go to his or her user talk page to leave a message. You should be polite (obviously), but you don't have to be ingratiating. A good starting point is to assume that Wikipedia is a working environment—so say what has to be said, and be fairly businesslike. For certain discussions, you might consider requesting an email exchange. The user whom you are contacting is free to delete your message after reading it (or even before). This is not something to make an issue about.
What happens when you begin a discussion on another user talk page depends on the user you have contacted. Logically, a thread started on [[User talk:BeanStalkJack]] would continue there, with [[user:BeanStalkJack]] replying to messages left for him. You can also request that the conversation proceed on your own user talk page: Just finish with "Please respond on my user talk page" before signing the post. If not, you will have to monitor [[User talk:BeanStalkJack]] for any answers. You might click the Watch tab before moving on; then all you have to remember is to consult your watchlist. Some users will respond on your user page anyway.
You often have a choice of where to take up a discussion arising from edits to an article. Should you write something on the article's talk page, or would it be better to go to the editor's user talk page? On the article's discussion page, everyone concerned can chip in, so if you have general concerns about an article, post them here. If you want to address a particular editor on some aspect of his or her work or ask a question about a particular edit, then post on the editor's user talk page.
Your watchlist defines your own personal corner of the huge Wikipedia site. It displays a set of recent changes for the subset of pages that you have specifically selected to watch. Using your watchlist means you can easily scan a list of the edits made to the pages or articles you are interested in, without having to go to each of those pages individually. By maintaining a watchlist, you can help defeat vandalism and keep the site tidy while monitoring topics of greatest interest to you. Your watchlist is private—only you can access it.
When you're logged in, you can access your watchlist by clicking My Watchlist, next to the My Preferences link in the upper-right corner.
The watchlist display (Figure 11-4) is similar to Recent Changes. Any changes made to the pages you are watching are listed here, one change per line, with the date of the change, the username of the editor who made the change, and a link to the diff.
One special feature of watchlists and Recent Changes, which is different from reading an individual page history, is the small colored number that appears after the page name and timestamp, but before the editor's name or IP address (Figure 11-5). This number refers to the amount of text, in bytes, that was changed during an individual edit. A green number with a plus sign means text was added; a red number with a minus sign means text was removed. A very large red number, for instance, may indicate that a page was blanked or significant content was removed, and you should check it out; similarly, a large green number with a single edit indicates that a great deal of text was added all at once. Note that the number refers to net change, so major edits may still result in a small number being displayed. A zero will display when a word is replaced by a word with the same number of letters (say four); this could still be a vandal!
Any page, whether it's an article or a project page, can be watched, or added to your watchlist. To watch a page, make sure you're logged in, and then click the Watch tab at the top of the article in question (Figure 11-6). Now any changes made to the page will show up on your watchlist. To unwatch a page, you can simply revisit the page; you'll notice the tab now says Unwatch. Click the tab again to remove the page.
You can also remove pages from your watchlist by clicking the View and Edit Watchlist link at the top of your watchlist; you'll be taken to a list of all the page titles you're watching. On the Recent Changes tab in My Preferences, you can customize the number of changes and the number of days that you wish to display.
Note
When you watch a page you are also watching its associated talk page; so if you watch an article, any changes made to the article or to its talk page will be listed.
Watchlists are not limited in terms of size , but the list tends to grow over time, and your interest in a page may only be temporary. For example, in a user talk page discussion, you might watch the page on which an active debate is happening. But when it concludes, you may have no further reason to be alerted to all changes, so you may want to remove the page from your watchlist. By default, any page you create is added to your watchlist; you can select other options from the Watchlist tab under My Preferences.
You can also create other types of notifications or alerts about edits to a particular page. This is helpful if you are only interested in a few pages.
To create an RSS feed or Atom feed (which is an alternative to RSS) of changes made to any page, follow these steps:
Go to the page you're interested in and click the History tab at the top of the article.
Now look under Toolbox on the left-hand sidebar menu.
You'll see two links for feed options (under Related Changes): RSS and Atom. You can add the links for these to a feed reader as with any other feed.
The feed will display as a page of diffs (Figure 11-7 shows a feed of changes to the page [[List of trees]] being displayed in NetNewsReader). This option could be handy if you're in the habit of checking your RSS feed reader but not Wikipedia, for instance, if you wanted to keep an eye on a particular page such as your own user talk page.
If you participate much in discussions about other editors (such as on the Requests for Adminship page), you'll likely hear references to edit count. This means the total number of page changes that a user has made, usually counting edits in all namespaces. Any contributor's history of edits and total edit count is publicly accessible; a record of all changes made by any account or IP address is kept. For any registered account, the user's editing history can be found from [[Special:Contributions/Nameofuser]], where Nameofuser is replaced by the user account name. If you want to see your own contributions, you can just click My Contributions in the upper-right corner, next to My Watchlist. Checking your own contributions can be a quick way to click back to a page that you have been working on or to follow up on a discussion that you have been contributing to.
![An RSS feed of changes made to the page [[List of trees]]](tagoreillycom20090804nostarchimages315986.png.jpg)
Checking out an editor's contribution history tells you what he or she has been working on recently. But this display is inconvenient for determining someone's total edit count, especially if that editor has made more than a few thousand edits. You can monitor your own edit count by checking at My Preferences; the count is posted just below your username. To check another contributor's edit count, in addition to [[Special:Contributions]] (which gives you a list of edits but doesn't provide a total number), you can use several automated tools that count edits for a given username. These tools can be found at [[Wikipedia:WikiProject edit counters]]. One caveat is these edit counters are provided as fun utilities, not as crucial project tools, and they tend to go offline or be unpredictably withdrawn. To see the top contributors, Wikipedia has a list, which is updated but not always regularly, at [[Wikipedia:List of Wikipedians by number of edits]] (shortcut WP:WBE). This list currently gives you an idea of the edit counts for the top 3,000 or so editors; as of 2008, you need at least 5,000 edits to appear on the list.
Edit count is important because this measure is the typical one used to enfranchise editors in elections (for instance, in previous years voters for Wikimedia Foundation board members had to have at least 400 edits on a single Wikimedia wiki), so having a certain edit count may bring suffrage in elections where only community members may participate. Additionally, the edit counts and patterns for administrator candidates are also debated (though no particular number is asked for, a count in the low thousands of edits or more is generally required to pass in Requests for Adminship, described in "Administrators" on Administrators). In other words, edit count is a measure of how experienced someone is as a Wikipedia editor.
Edit count is only somewhat useful though. Although edit count is correlated with experience editing Wikipedia, this correlation is rough. Don't think better of someone just because he is poor at finding the preview button. The raw edit count is crude and undiscriminating—counting typo fixes and vandalism reverts is the same as adding thoughtful content or references, though anyone who is truly interested can, of course, sample an account's contributions and draw better conclusions about the quality of an editor's work. Historically, the most committed individual editors, editing normally, have contributed at a peak rate of around 3,000 edits a month, or 100 a day. This rate requires full use of free time and not having a life outside Wikipedia and is not necessarily sustainable.
The author of the original tool for counting edits noted that editcountitis, or an unhealthy obsession with the notion of edit count, can be fatal. Editcountitis is often a symptom of Wikipediholism, which is an even worse disease. The only sure treatment is worrying more about the quality of your edits than the quantity. You have been warned; head over to [[Wikipedia:Wikipediholism test]] (shortcut WP:WHT) for a humorous diagnosis.