FFXIclopedia:User Pages

FFXIclopedia provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in its project to build an encyclopedia.

If your username is Example:
 * Your user page is the page at User:Example (or Special:Mypage)
 * Your user talk page is the page at User talk:Example (or Special:Mytalk)
 * Your user subpages are pages of the form User:Example/Merits (Special:Mypage/Merits) or User talk:Example/Archive (Special:Mytalk/Archive).
 * Your user space is the collection of all the above.


 * Note: "Your" in this context means associated with you, not belonging to you.

The Special:Mypage and Special:Mytalk special pages will take each user to her or his own user and user talk pages, respectively. Others will not be able to find your user page using Special:Mypage, they will be able to visit it only by going to User:Example (for the example user).

Details about you should not go in the main namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content.

What can I have on my user page?
Your userpage is for anything that is compatible with the FFXIclopedia project. It is a mistake to think of it as a homepage. FFXIclopedia is not a blog, 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 FFXIclopedia, and also a way of helping other editors to understand with whom they're working.

Some people add 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 and are by no means required to emulate this.)

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

Another common use is to let people know about your activities on FFXIclopedia and in Final Fantasy XI. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activities on FFXIclopedia or in FFXI. If you won't be editing FFXIclopedia for a while, drop a note on your user page to that effect.

Others may edit your user page, although the practice is discouraged. Comments about a user page are better left for a user on their talk page.

Many users like to insert userboxes into their user pages. Note that some userboxes will also add a category to your userpage (such as Category:Users on Alexander).

You are welcome to include a link to your personal home page, although you should not surround it with any promotional language.

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

What can I not have on my user page?
Generally, you should avoid substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to FFXIclopedia. FFXIclopedia is not a general hosting service, so your user page is not a personal homepage. Your page is about you as a member of the FFXIclopedia community and player of FFXI. Excessive material unrelated to FFXIclopedia or FFXI is not allowed.

User pages are also not to be used as a Linkshell homepage or to coordinate Linkshell activities.

In general, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for FFXIclopedia, it should be placed on a personal web site.

Do not put your userpage or subpages, including work-in-progress articles, into categories used by FFXIclopedia articles. Be careful of templates and stub notices that put a work-in-progress article into categories. You can "quote" categories by adding a colon before "Category", like this: Category:Blue Magic. This turns it into an ordinary link. Templates and stub notices can be turned into links to themselves by putting tl| ("tl" followed by a pipe character) in front of their names, like this: stub

Copies of other pages
While userpages and subpages can be used as a development ground for generating new content, this space is not intended to indefinitely archive your preferred version of disputed or previously deleted content. Private copies of pages that are being used solely for long-term archival purposes may be subject to deletion.

Similarly, pages kept in userspace should not be designed to functionally substitute for articles or FFXIclopedia space pages. If you find that your user subpage has become as useful as a normal article or project page, consider moving it into the appropriate namespace or merging it with other similar pages already existing there. One should rarely create links from a mainspace article to any userpage.

Images on user pages
FFXIclopedia editors are allowed to upload a single picture of no larger than 30 KB for use on their user page. This policy is set forth in more detail here.

Ownership and editing of pages in the user space
As a tradition, FFXIclopedia offers wide latitude to users to manage their user space as they see fit. However, pages in user space still do belong to the community:
 * Contributions must be licensed under the GFDL, just as articles are.
 * Other users may edit pages in your user space, although by convention your user page will usually not be edited by others.
 * Community policies apply to your user space just as they do elsewhere.

In general it is considered polite to avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission. The best option is to draw their attention to the matter on their talk page and let them edit their user page themselves if they agree on a need to do so.

Removal of warnings
Policy does not prohibit users from removing comments from their own talk pages. The removal of a warning is taken as evidence that the warning has been read by the user. Deleted warnings can still be found in the page history.

What about user subpages?
If you need more pages, you can create subpages. More or less, you can have anything here that you might have on your user or user talk page.

Examples:
 * A work in progress, until it is ready to be released.
 * Archives of user talk.
 * Sections of the main page that are big enough to require their own page, e.g. a page of merits or spells.

How do I create a user subpage?
In certain namespaces, it is possible to create a subpage of a "parent" page. So if a page is called "PAGE", a subpage of "PAGE" with the name "SUBPAGE" would be located at "PAGE/SUBPAGE".

User:Example/Merits is an example of a user subpage for User:Example. Your user page, if it exists yet, is here. If you wanted to create a user subpage called "Sandbox", you would find it here.

To link to a user subpage called "Sandbox" from your main user page, place the text
 * /Sandbox

on your page, or use a piped link with the same source. If your user page does not have a subpage named "Sandbox", the link will appear to be red, indicating that a page has no content, and if you just navigate away without saving any content the page will not be created and there is nothing to delete.

How do I delete my user and user talk pages?
Where there is no significant abuse and no administrative need to retain the personal information, you can request that your own user page and user subpages be deleted. Most frequently, this occurs when a longterm contributor decides to leave.

A sysop will then delete it after checking that the page does not contain evidence of policy violations that may need to be kept. If there has been no disruptive behavior meriting the retention of that personal information, then the sysop can delete the page straight away in order to eliminate general public distribution of the history containing the information.

As a matter of practice user talk pages are generally not deleted, barring legal threats or other grievous violations that have to be removed for legal reasons; however, exceptions to this can be and are made on occasion for good reason.

User pages that have been deleted can be recreated with a blank page to avoid red links pointing to them.

What other information is accessible to others from my user page?
In addition to the usual information accessible from an article page such as page history, "Discuss this page" and the like, other users at FFXIclopedia can also click "User contributions" (in the sidebar or at the bottom of the page) to see what contributions you have made at FFXIclopedia over time. Please note that having your user page deleted does not delete this list of your contributions.