Help:Talk pages
- parent: Help:Contents
Wikipedia has detailed guidance on the use of talk pages. See wikipedia:Help:Talk pages to learn more.
StructuredDiscussions
In 2020, we experimented with "StructuredDiscusssions" (also known as "Flow"). This is a feature that Wikimedia Foundation was developing for English Wikipedia. It's not entirely clear how the Wikimedia Foundation plans to make Talk page more usable, but as of this writing (20:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)), we're going to be using old-school policy and conventions here on electowiki.
Signing comments
The several tilde signs ("~) in a row have special meaning on all wiki pages, and are especially useful on Talk pages:
- 3 tildes ("
~~~") is replaced with your user id (e.g. "RobLa (talk)") - 4 tildes ("
~~~~") to put both your user id and the date and time in UTC (e.g. "RobLa (talk) 20:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)") - 5 tildes ("
~~~~~") to put just the date and time in UTC (e.g. "20:14, 25 October 2023 (UTC)")
Please get into the habit of signing any comment you make on Talk pages with four tildes ("~~~~").
References
Anything that shows up wrapped with "<ref></ref>" will show up in one of the following sections:
- The "Footnotes" section at the bottom of the page (if someone was kind enough to add that)
- Wherever the
<references/>tag is inserted on the page (if someone added that) - Someplace random, probably at the bottom of the page.
User:RobLa would like to make it a convention that we all add a "Footnotes" section to the bottom of the page.
All of the talk pages
These can be found at "Talk:" namespace.
One can put a list of all of the pages in the Talk: namespace onto a wiki page by adding the following wikitext:
{{Special:PrefixIndex/Talk:}}
Footnotes
Some talk pages should have a "Footnotes" section (e.g. like this page has a "#Footnotes" section), especially if any comments use the "<references/>" tag. The "Footnotes" section needs the <references/> tag in order to collect the references scattered throughout the comments.