Wiktionary:Usernames and user pages

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.

Shortcut:
WT:USER

Usernames

Usernames:

must not be offensive, as an offensive username can interfere with the community-building essential to a wiki. If you're not sure whether a username could be considered offensive, it's probably best not to use it.
must not resemble another user's username, or anyone's real name (except your own), as these sorts of usernames can cause confusion and can seem deceptive.
must not be promotional, i.e., they should not resemble a business name, trademark, or web address.
should preferably be fairly easy for the typical English-speaker to recognize, remember, and type. This generally means being fairly short; using the Latin alphabet if possible (though some digits, spaces, and/or punctuation may be included as well); and avoiding long unpronounceable sequences of characters. This rule is somewhat flexible, especially due to the creation of unified logins.

If you've already created and begun to use an account with an unacceptable username, you can request a username change at Wiktionary:Changing username, or you can simply create a new account with an acceptable username. If you already have an account on another Wikimedia project, we strongly recommend you use the same account here, using unified login.

Signatures

Main article: Wiktionary: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 above.
must link prominently to your user page and/or your talk page.
must not use any templates.
should be fairly easy for the typical English speaker to recognize and remember. Please 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.

User pages

Wiktionary is a dictionary, not a personal website, and for this reason there are rules on what user pages may contain. User pages which do not adhere to these guidelines may be nominated for deletion or even "speedily deleted" in clear-cut cases (spam, offensive messages, etc.).

While this is not a hard rule, you should probably avoid creating a user page on your first edit. This guideline is usually enforced more strictly for users who do not contribute to the dictionary proper.

User pages:

should be largely constructive toward the goals of Wiktionary (i.e., no blog posts).
must not contain controversial or offensive content (as above).
should indicate what languages you speak/sign/understand/read/write, and how well. If you like, you can use the "Babel templates" (see {{Babel}}) for this; these templates also add your user page to relevant categories, so others can easily find editors with knowledge of a certain language.
must not contain any Wikipedia-style userboxes without prior discussion and consensus (see WT:UBV). Those that have been discussed and allowed are:
1. Language templates (mentioned above).
2. Script templates to indicate your proficiency with different writing systems. These can be used automatically with {{Babel}}.
3. Coding skill templates to indicate your proficiency with computer languages that are relevant to Wiktionary; currently allowed are Lua (used for modules), template markup (i.e. MediaWiki wikitext with parser functions) and JavaScript (for gadgets).
4. {{User time zone}} to indicate your time zone. This may help others determine your likelihood of responding in a given time frame.
5. {{currently}} to indicate what you're currently working on.
6. sister-project link boxes (such as {{wikipedia}}) to link to your user pages on other projects.
should not contain gratuitous animations or disrupt Wiktionary's page layout (e.g. position: fixed or position: absolute).
may link to your user pages on other Wikimedia projects.
may describe your real-life activities and/or link to your own website, but should not be promotional or spammy.

It is also preferable to keep user pages and user talk pages plain and avoid excessive inline styles. These rules also apply to user subpages (e.g. User:Example~enwiktionary/subpage, which would be a subpage of User:Example~enwiktionary)

Unregistered users ("IPs") should not have user pages, as IP addresses change periodically, meaning that a user page no longer belongs to the same user once the IP changes. Furthermore, if another user were later to use the Wiktionary with the same IP, they would inherit the user page automatically. However, anyone can create an account for free; see Special:UserLogin.

User pages of permanently blocked users may be deleted at any time. If such a user is unblocked, any deleted pages may be restored at the user's request.

User talk

User talk pages (namespace User talk:) are for other users to leave messages about the contributions of the user concerned (and for their responses). They are also used to ask questions of the user, to make them aware of activity elsewhere in the wiki, and for community discussion of issues relevant to certain users. Discussions should not contain unnecessarily malicious or offensive material. Off-topic discussion should generally be done in private, such as by email or over a social networking website.

User talk pages may be archived using subpages (for example, User talk:Example~enwiktionary/archive would be a standard place to archive User talk:Example~enwiktionary once the latter becomes too big) or content may be deleted entirely. It may be considered bad etiquette to delete a discussion on a user talk page while the discussion is still active. Such a removal may be undone or reverted to allow the discussion to continue.