Wikipedia:Signatures
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This page is considered a guideline on Wikipedia. It is generally accepted among editors and is considered a standard that all users should follow. However, it is not set in stone and should be treated with common sense and the occasional exception. When editing this page, please ensure that your revision reflects consensus. When in doubt, discuss first on the talk page. |
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This page in a nutshell: Please sign your posts on talk pages, keep the coding of your signature short, don't make the signature too large, and ensure that the end result is readable by people with color blindness. |
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Signing your posts on Wikipedia talk pages is a guideline for the use of user signatures on Wikipedia. For instructions on how to sign your posts, see below.
Signing your posts on talk pages and other Wikipedia discourse (but not on articles) is not only good etiquette; it also facilitates discussion by helping other users to identify the author of a particular comment, to navigate talk pages, and to address specific comments to the relevant user(s), among other things. Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing as it helps other users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.
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Purpose of signatures
Signatures on Wikipedia identify you as a user, and your contributions to Wikipedia. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment, and the date and time at which it was made. Because of that, having an incivil signature is strongly discouraged (in some cases, to the point of blocking the user until they change it). In general, anything that is not allowed in a user name should not be used in a signature either.
When signatures should and should not be used
Any post made to user talk pages, article talk pages, or other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures on Wikipedia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any Wikipedia article. Rather, the edit history takes care of the need to identify edits with users. Signatures should therefore not be used in edit summaries as they do not translate from ~~~~. In other instances when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.
How to "sign" your posts
There are two ways to sign your posts:
1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~.
2. If you are using the edit toolbar option (which must be enabled under Special:Preferences), click the signature icon (
) to add the four tildes.
Your signature will appear after you have saved the changes.
The end result is the same in both cases. Typing four tildes will result in the following:
| Wikimarkup | Resulting code | Resulting display |
|---|---|---|
~~~~ |
[[User:SampleUser|SampleUser]] 09:23, April 8 2007 (UTC) |
SampleUser 09:23, April 8 2007 (UTC) |
Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.
Typing three tildes results in the following:
| Wikimarkup | Resulting code | Resulting display |
|---|---|---|
~~~ |
[[User:SampleUser|SampleUser]] |
SampleUser |
Since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.
Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:
| Wikimarkup | Resulting code | Resulting display |
|---|---|---|
~~~~~ |
09:23, April 8 2007 (UTC) |
09:23, April 8 2007 (UTC) |
Note that if you choose to contribute to Wikipedia without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username.
Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address instead of a user name because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity. In actual fact, a pseudonymous account (that is, a registered user name) actually provides you with more protection of your identity as IP addresses can be easily tracked by anyone.
Note also that signing manually with a pseudonym or tag such as --anon does not give you more anonymity or privacy protection, since your IP address will still be stored in the page history. This also makes it more difficult for other users to communicate with you. If you choose to sign this way, you should still type four tildes: --anon ~~~~.
See also: Automatic conversion of wikitext in Help.
Customizing your signature
Registered users can customize their signature by going to Special:Preferences and changing the field "Signature".
When customizing your signature, please keep the following in mind: A distracting, confusing or otherwise unsuitable signature may adversely affect other users. Some editors find it disruptive to discourse on talk pages, or when working in the edit window. Very long signatures that contain a lot of code ("markup") make it difficult for some editors to read talk pages while editing.
In no circumstance should a signature be used to impersonate another user: in particular, a signature should not be identical to the actual username of an existing user. While not an absolute requirement, it is common practice for a signature to resemble to some degree the username it represents.
If asking another user to change their signature, remember to remain polite. If you are asked to change your signature, please avoid interpreting a polite request as an attack. As Wikipedia is based on working together in harmony, both parties should work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.
Signatures have been the subject of Requests for Comment, as well as resulting in some very heated debates. In one case, a user who refused to alter an unsuitable signature was ultimately required to change it by the Arbitration Committee.
Appearance and color
Your signature should not blink, or otherwise inconvenience or be annoying to other editors.
- Markup such as
<big>tags (which produce big text), or line breaks (<br />tags) are to be avoided, since they disrupt the way that surrounding text displays - Be sparing with superscript or subscript. In some cases, this type of script can also affect the way that surrounding text is displayed
- Avoid making your signature so small that it is difficult to read
- In consideration of users with vision problems, be sparing with color. If you must use different colors in your signature, please ensure that the result will be readable by people with color blindness.
Images
Images of any kind shall not be used in signatures.
Many concerns have been raised over the use of images in signatures, and they are considered to serve no use to the encyclopedia project. Images in signatures shall not be used for several reasons:
- they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown
- a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks
- they reduce searchability, making pages more difficult to read
- they 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
- they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page
- images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution
See also bugzilla:6379.
Language and alphabet
Signatures with non-Latin script should also include Latin script.
If your preferred signature consists of characters not in the Latin alphabet (hànzì, for example) you should include Latin characters also. Typically, this might be a Latin transliteration of your username, alongside your actual username. This is because characters not within the ASCII character set may not display properly for everyone. This is a particular problem for people who use screen readers. This also makes it easier to search for your username using the search function, and for other editors to refer to you.
Length
Keep signatures short, both in display and markup.
Long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing more difficult. A 200 character signature, for instance, is larger than many of the comments to which it is appended, making discussion more difficult, because:
- signatures that take up more than two or three lines in the edit window clutter the page and make it harder to distinguish posts from signatures,
- long signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution,
- signatures which have long HTML/wiki markup and contain no spaces cause other editors' edit boxes to show unnecessary horizontal scrollbars (such signatures may have spaces added to them by any editor)
- Signatures that occupy more space than necessary in the edit box displace meaningful comments, thus forcing the editor to scroll when writing his reply. The presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating his reply.
Internal links
It is common practice to include a link to your user page or user talk page (often both); the default signature links the user page. If, while making modifications, you inadvertently disable this link, see how to fix your signature. When you insert your signature on your talk or user page the talk or user link will appear black, bold and inactive as it is a self-reference, so test your signature elsewhere.
Although it is always better to put information on your user page rather than your signature, including brief additional internal links is generally tolerated when used to facilitate communication, or to provide general information, but undesirable if seen as canvassing for some purpose. Do not place any disruptive internal links, such as <super>SIGN HERE!!!</super>, which refers to an autograph page.
External links
Do not include links to external websites in your signature.
Mass posting of links to a particular website is strongly discouraged on Wikipedia. Posting a link to an external website with each comment you make on a talk page could be taken as linkspamming, or an attempt to improve your website's ranking on search engines. Although this doesn't actually work, it's best not to do it. If you want to tell other Wikipedians about a good website with which you are associated, you can do so on your user page.
Transclusion of templates
Transclusions of templates and parser functions in signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example) are forbidden, because the developers have determined them to be an unnecessary drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing--whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached.
Signature templates are also vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content, use no more resources than the comments themselves and avoid these problems.
Categories
Signatures must not contain categories. Categorizing talk pages by who has edited them is unhelpful, and the same information can be found by using your contributions list. Many of the various edit counting utilities also provide this data.
Dealing with unsigned comments
The templates {{unsigned}} and {{unsignedIP}} can be used at the end of an unsigned comment to attach the username or IP to the comment. None of these templates automatically populate (fill in) the name or IP of the poster and the time of the post. That information is best copied from the history page and pasted into the below templates.
| Wikimarkup | Resulting code | Resulting display |
|---|---|---|
| {{unsigned|user name or IP}} | {{unsigned|Example}} | —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Example (talk • contribs). |
| {{unsigned|user name or IP|date}} | {{unsigned|Example|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}} | —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC). |
| {{unsignedIP|IP address}} | {{unsignedIP|127.0.0.1}} | —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 127.0.0.1 (talk) |
| {{unsignedIP|IP address|date}} | {{unsignedIP|127.0.0.1|23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC)}} | —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 127.0.0.1 (talk) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC) |
The template {{unsigned2}} does almost the same as {{unsigned}} when used with two parameters, but the ordering of the parameters is reversed. This is useful for copying and pasting from the edit history, where the timestamp appears before the username. {{unsigned2}} also automatically adds the (UTC) at the end.
| Wikimarkup | Resulting code | Resulting display |
|---|---|---|
| {{unsigned2|date|user name or ip}} | {{unsigned2|23:59, 1 April, 2006|Example}} | —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Example (talk • contribs) 23:59, 1 April, 2006 (UTC) |
It is also a good idea to notify users, especially new users, that they should sign their comments. You may use the template {{tilde}} on the user's talk page or one of the welcome messages for new users.
More about talk pages
See Wikipedia:Talk page for accepted conventions and guidelines regarding the use of talk pages.
