This page documents an English Wikipedia project content guideline. Editors should generally follow it, though exceptions may apply. Substantive edits to this page should reflect consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page.

Shortcuts WP:UP WP:USER WP:USERPAGE

This guideline in a nutshell: User pages are for communication and collaboration. While considerable leeway is allowed in personalizing and managing your user pages, they are community project pages, not a personal website, blog, social networking medium, or a Wikipedia article. They should be used to better participate in the community, and not used to excess for unrelated purposes nor to bring the project into disrepute.

User pages are pages for organizing the work users do on Wikipedia, as well as speaking to other users. User pages are mainly for interpersonal discussion, notices, testing and drafts (see: Sandboxes), and, if desired, limited autobiographical and personal content. Pages in the User and User talk namespaces are considered to be user pages.

User pages are available to Wikipedia users personally for purposes compatible with the Wikipedia project and acceptable to the community; Wikipedia is not a blog, webspace provider, or social networking site. Wikipedia policies concerning the content of pages can and generally do apply to user pages, and users must observe these policies. Users believed to be in violation of these policies should first be advised on their talk page using {{subst:uw-userpage}} when immediate action is not otherwise necessary.

Your in this context means associated with you, not belonging to you.

User page

Your user page has a name like this: User:Example. (This link is to yours.) Its normal use is to give basic information, if you wish, about yourself or your Wikimedia-related activities. If you prefer to put nothing here, then you can redirect it to your user talk page for the convenience of other editors. You may also wish to create a global user page that will display on all Wikimedia projects where you have not created a local user page.

User talk page

Your user talk page (sometimes abbreviated to "your talk page" or "your user talk") has a name like this: User talk:Example. (This link is to yours.) Its normal use is for messages from, and discussion with, other editors. The only editing tool you can use with user talk pages is Source Editor, and not Visual Editor. For more information see Help:Using talk pages.

Subpages

Shortcuts

• WP:UP#SUB
• WP:USERSUBPAGE
• WP:CREATEUSER#SUB

Subpages in user space can be used to store sandboxes, essays about Wikipedia, and drafts of Wikipedia articles, among other things. You can create these subpages yourself.

User pages or user space

All of these pages are your user pages or user space. While you do not "own" them, by custom you may manage them as you wish, so long as you do so reasonably and within these guidelines.

You also have subpages ending in .js and .css to store any user scripts and skin customizations that you may wish to have when you edit Wikipedia. Only you and interface administrators can edit such pages, although anyone can view them.

You can create subpages of your User page and your Talk page. To create a subpage, type the following into the Wikipedia search box and press the ↵ Enter key, replacing "Your_Wikipedia_Name" with your username:

User:Your_Wikipedia_Name/subpage_name

This will bring you to a page with the title User:Your_Wikipedia_Name/subpage_name. Now click the "Create" button next to the Wikipedia search box and the editing window will open. Enter a few test words and save the new page. You will notice that different from your user page, a subpage contains a backlink to your user page, which looks like this:

<User:Your_Wikipedia_Name

Clicking on the backlink will bring you to your user page. But, contrary to what you might expect, no new tab has been created for "subpages", for example, containing a list of all of your subpages; everything on your user page is unchanged. So how do you navigate to your subpage? As a method of last resort, you can always go back to your subpage by adding the title of your subpage to the URL of your user page:

If your home page URL is:
https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=User:Your_Wikipedia_Name
just add the name of your subpage:
https://en.wikipedia.org?pojem=User:Your_Wikipedia_Name/subpage_name

There is, of course, an easier method, but it has to be done manually. Copy and modify the following text and put it on your user page:

Special:Prefixindex/User:Your_Wikipedia_Name

After saving your user page, clicking on this link will provide you with a list of all pages containing the string "User:Your_Wikipedia_Name", which in our case includes the sandbox, the user page and, of course, the newly created subpage.

Users will be notified when someone else edits their user talk page. Since 30 April 2013, registered users receive a notification through the new Wikipedia:Notifications system (see image right); unregistered users still receive notifications with the old-style Orange Bar. Registered users wishing to add back the functionality of the Orange Bar notification may do so through this script.

For users not editing with an account (unregistered users), the alert below is automatically displayed on all pages until they view their user talk page. If they click "new message," it will direct them to the bottom of their talk page. If they click "last change," it will show them the last edit done to their talk page. Creating a fake message banner that misleads readers into thinking they have new messages is prohibited.

The links Special:MyPage and Special:MyTalk are shortcuts that take any user to their own user and user talk pages. If someone is to visit your (or someone else's) user or user talk pages, a proper page link will be needed (e.g., User talk:Example). In practice, user and user talk pages are mostly visited by clicking on user signatures in discussions, and links shown in page histories and diffs.

In addition to the usual information accessible from an article page such as page history, "Discuss this page" and the like, users visiting user and user talk pages can also click "User contributions" (in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page) to see what contributions you have made at Wikipedia over time, and "Logs" to see records of other events related to your editorship, done by yourself and by others. (Note that having your user page deleted does not delete any list of your wider contributions.)

Visitors to your user page can also click "Email this user" if you have opted in your user preferences to be able to send and receive email. Your email address will remain private unless you reveal it yourself, select the option to reveal it (in preferences), or reply using an email system outside Wikipedia.

There is no fixed use for user pages, except that usually one's user page has something about oneself, and one's talk page is used for messaging. Provided other users can quickly and easily find the pages they need, users may, within reason, freely organize their user pages as they choose.

Users may include a user page notice on their own user pages, user talk pages, or both. Placing the template {{User page}} at the start of a user page clearly identifies the nature of the page for readers, and also helps if people find the labeled page in copies of Wikipedia elsewhere (more about this below) and want to locate the original.

Contributions can also be given a wider license – for example releasing them into the public domain or multi-licensing them – by putting a notice to this effect on one's user page, or on a subpage linked from it. Note that it is not possible to give them narrower licensing: all edits on Wikipedia, including all userspace edits, are licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License and in most cases the GNU Free Documentation License as part of Wikipedia.

User pages may be mirrored by other sites. If there is material you do not want copied, reposted, or reused, do not post it on the site.

Certain kinds of material must not linger indefinitely in user space; see below for details.

Besides communication, other legitimate uses of user space include (but are not limited to):