Wiktionary:Signatures

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. This is a draft proposal. It is unofficial, and it is unknown whether it is widely accepted by Wiktionary editors. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Signatures

Basic Signature

You should add your signature to any talk/discussion entry. Do this by signing your posts with four tildes ~~~~

Custom signatures:

Special:Preferences allows you to create a custom signature, that may differ from your username.

• must not be offensive, misleading or promotional as described at Wiktionary:Usernames and user pages.
• must link prominently to your userpage and/or your talkpage.
• should be fairly easy for the typical English-speaker to recognize and remember. (For this one, keep in mind that not everyone's computer will support non-English letters very well, and a long string of boxes or question marks is not very identifiable.)
• should bear a clear resemblance to your username.
• must not exceed 255 characters, including any characters used for formatting or other markup.

Templates

As on the English Wikipedia, for the reasons detailed below, templates (whether substituted or transcluded) are not permitted to be used as all or part of a user signature.

1. Signature templates are vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project.
2. Certain automated scripts (bots) are used to automatically archive particularly active talk pages. These bots read the source of the talk page, but don't transclude templates, and so don't recognize the template as a signature.
3. Signature templates are a small but 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.
4. Substitution of templates in signatures is also not allowed, as any such template either will violate the reasonable length restriction of 255 characters or will be redundant to using the same content as a raw signature.
5. Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content and use no more resources than the comments themselves, avoid these problems.

Length

Keep signatures short, both in display and markup.

Extremely long signatures with a lot of HTML/wiki markup make page editing and discussion more difficult for the following reasons:

• 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 their reply, and
• the presence of such long signatures in the discussion also disrupts the reading of comments when an editor is formulating their reply

The software will automatically truncate both plain and raw signatures to 255 characters (characters used for HTML/wiki markup are included!).