User talk:ChivonFraserPurcell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

What can I have on my user page? Your userpage is for anything that is compatible with the Wikipedia project. It is a mistake to think of it as a homepage: Wikipedia is not a free host, webspace provider, or social networking site. Instead, think of it as a way of organizing the work that you are doing on the articles in Wikipedia, and also a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they're working.

Some people add a little information about themselves as well, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), a photograph, their real name, their location, information about their areas of expertise and interest, likes and dislikes, homepages, and so forth. If you are concerned with privacy, you may not want to emulate this.

You can also use your user page to help to use Wikipedia more effectively: so you can use it to list "to do" information, work in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It's also good for experimenting with markup (that is, as a personal sandbox).

Another use is to let people know about your activities on Wikipedia, and your opinions about Wikipedia. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on Wikipedia, and your (constructive) opinions on how certain Wikipedia articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing Wikipedia for a while, drop a note on your user page to that effect.

You might want to add quotes that you like, or a picture, or some of your favorite Wikipedia articles or images (free licensed only, see the #What can I not have on my user page? section below), or something like that. Also, someone may choose to award you a barnstar. In the event that your editing privileges on Wikipedia are revoked, a notice of this may be placed on your user page.

If you want to dual-license your contributions under an additional license or declare them all public domain, put a notice to this effect on your user page. Because of the large templates and long category names, some editors move the license templates to a subpage (see below). Whether you include an explicit license statement or not, however, all of your edits on Wikipedia are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License already.

You may include one or more Wikipedian categories, such as Category:Wikipedian musicians. Wikipedian categories are intended to help Wikipedians with similar broad interests to congregate and converse. They have some similarity to Wikiprojects, but are much less formal. Wikipedian categories should not overlap with article categories. It is important to include the word "Wikipedian" in such category names. Also, they should be categories with the general Wikipedian category. See also: Wikipedia:User categorisation. Many users include mentions of the languages they're fluent in (see Wikipedia:Babel).

You are welcome to include a link to your personal home page, although you should refrain from surrounding it with any promotional language.

Note that user pages are often reached through user signatures on talk pages.