Wikipedia:WikiProject User Page Help/Content Advice/Sandboxes

You can create subpages in userspace as private 'sandboxes'. You can use this space to experiment with Wiki syntax, or to work on articles without worrying about whether the article is ready to go public. Remember that:

1. When moving articles to and from userspace it is easy to inadvertently break the terms of the GFDL by forgetting to leave a trail back to where the content came from. If you cut and paste content from an article into your userspace, remember to leave an edit summary such as "Content taken from Article", and do the same if you want to move content back into the main article.
2. User subpages should not be included in any categories meant for articlespace. If you copy and paste an article containing categories, you can:
   1. Remove them
   2. Put <nowiki></nowiki> tags around them: <nowiki>[[Category:Australians]]</nowiki> produces [[Category:Australians]]
   3. Comment them out with <!-- -->: <!-- [[Category:Australians]]--> produces absolutely nothing
   4. Put [[:Category:Australians]] instead of [[Category:Australians]] (note the extra colon): this produces Category:Australians.

   Be especially aware of templates that include categories, such as {{POV}} or {{stub}}. Again, you can remove the template, nowiki it, comment it out, or subst it with {{subst:POV}} instead of {{POV}} to convert the template into its raw code, then remove the category manually as above (you will need to replace the template on moving it back into articlespace).

3. User subpages can be stumbled across by users unfamiliar with Wikipedia via Google (though not by Wikipedia's built-in search unless the searcher chooses to search in userspace). To avoid people mistaking your work in progress as an actual article, add {{userwip|articlename}} to the top, replacing "articlename" with the name of the article your work in progress is based on, in order to point users who stumble on your WIP accidentally to the most current readable article. This produces:

This page is a user's work in progress page, not an article, and may be incomplete and/or unreliable. The current version of this article is located at Duck-billed platypus.