Anonymity is a Roadblock - Full Disclosure is a Portal
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Help:Username page
From Open Lives
(From Mediawiki)
Usually, a username page is a page about a wiki user with hir username as its title located in the User: namespace. In order for someone to have a username page, s/he must be registered on the wiki, and most likely has created or edited some pages of the wiki, if only by contributing to a threaded discussion. However in the Open Lives family of wikis, Open Lives has the sole purpose of being the repository of information about all registered users of the family. Therefore, on Open Lives the major part of the information about any user will be on a page with hir username as title in the main namespace, and the standard username page in the User: namespace will only contain at most a first things with s/he wants to keep separate (and uneditable by any others) and then a link to hir main username page. In fact, it is strongly advised and recommended that the User:username page be redirected to the username page in the main namespace.
When you are registered, your username page in the main namespace will be created containing the biographical information that you submitted to gain registration and a redirect to that page will be placed on your User:username page. A link to your username page, and other of your personal pages, will then be shown on the top right of every page of each member of the wiki family whenever you are logged in. In addition, others will see links to your username page from various places which will assist wiki collaboration. This includes the “Recent changes” and “page history” displays (See Help:Tracking changes), but most of all includes every meta or discussion page, since these always contain the signature of every writer in the subject line of each section (which on these types of pages is essentially one message in a thread).
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What to put on your user page
User pages are just as flexible as any other wiki page, and it's a page all about you, so generally people will leave you to freely write your user page in whatever format you like. It's a feature to help other people know who you are, and to bring the online community closer together. Think of it as a “profile” page. You might like to mention where you are from and what your job is. You can also state what your main areas of interest are in relation to the topic of the wiki, and describe contributions you have made or areas where you are interested in contributing.
User scratchpad / development area
You can use your user page as a scratchpad. An area for developing ideas without cluttering the main namespace (see Help:Namespaces). If subpages are enabled (see Help:Subpages), you may find them useful for creating sub pages under your user page. However you should avoid expending too much effort within your own area of the wiki. Be bold! Edit the main wiki articles! If you wiki has a shared Sandbox page, you can also use it for quick (non-permanent) wiki experimentation.
Other people's user pages
As mentioned above, you will see links to other people's user pages, in various places throughout the wiki.
User Contributions
When viewing another person's user page, an additional link “page Changes" appears in the “toolbox” of the sidebar. This takes you to a list of all of this user's wiki edits. Use this to get an idea of how prolific a contributor somebody is, or to track down edits made by a user who is causing trouble/making bad wiki edits.
Editing someone else's page
It's generally considered bad etiquette to rewrite or reword another person's user page. Editing is not disallowed, but you should avoid adding information (or especially opinions) which might be misinterpreted as coming from that user, in situations where this could potentially cause upset. Some types of edit are widely acceptable, and unlikely to cause upset:
- Fixing internal links, when a page has been moved or deleted
- Fixing broken external links
- Categorizing or fixing categories of user pages.
User talk pages
Every user page has an associated talk page; a "user meta page". This is a special kind of talk page, for leaving messages directed at a particular user. See Help:Talk pages#User Talk pages.
