Fallout Wiki:The Vault Academy/General editing/Lesson four

Now we will look at user and talk pages which are commonly used by editors to communicate with one another.

User pages[]

User pages, or your profile, are a place where you can add fun things to express yourself. You can choose a profile picture, add info about yourself, and personalize the main section of the page. The only things you should not do are add anything inappropriate, impersonate someone else, or post something that looks like an article.

As we move along, you will learn about images and code, which can be used to spruce up your user page, too. By typing "user:" and then a user name in the search bar, you can take a look at anyone's page for inspiration. Just remember, you can click "edit" on someone else's user page to see (and copy) their code, but do not make any changes to anyone's page. We will go over other options for user page additions in the lessons ahead.

Signature[]

Before we look into talk pages, we must learn about signatures. Every user can use four tildes (~~~~) to automatically add their user name, date, and time, or "signature" to a post. You should always use this method to "sign" your talk page messages, forum posts, and votes.

You can type three (~~~) to leave just your name without the date and time. Five tildes will leave only the date and time (used in templates, more on that later).

To personalize your signature, you can change it under "my preferences." Make sure any images are not taller than 35px and that you don't choose graphics or colors that will be illegible on either dark or light mode. Make sure to check the "treat signature as wiki text" box underneath.

Below is my signature's wiki text, so you can see how it looks in the html and final forms. You can use it as a template, copy it, and personalize it to your liking if you would like a starting point. Make sure to look at your signature in both light and dark mode to make sure it is visible. You can switch between light and dark mode by clicking the moon or sun symbol in the upper right hand corner.

User talk page[]

Talk pages serve as message walls, where users can leave comments for you, and you can leave messages for them. You should not delete anything from your talk page, or the talk page of others because administrators need easy access to these page's histories at times. You can make minor formatting fixes.

Exception: If someone leaves something abusive or hateful on your talk page or the talk page of someone else, delete it, and contact an administrator right away. We will handle the next steps.

Talk page comments are formatted with a subheader title, then the comment below, and ends with a user's signature. To reply, users can navigate to the other user's talk page to leave a reply. In the signature example above, the heart of my signature links to my talk page for convenience. A lot of users do this, but if not, you can always search for a user's talk page by typing "User talk:theirnamehere" in the search bar. Leave new messages at the bottom.

If the conversation goes back and forth, users will indent their subsequent replies with a colon. Two colons will indent it further, and so on, as seen in the example below.

Quiz[]

Follow the image below to take the quiz.