Help:User Page

Deborah Ann Jones Shirley

For New Contributors and Moderators
Your user page is a great place where people can learn more about you and your genealogical interests. Begin with a little biography about yourself. Write a short paragraph or two about your research interests, places you have worked, or societies of which you are a member. As you become more familiar with FamilySearch Wiki, please come back to share more about yourself and include some of the great tools or ideas below to develop your user page even further.

What is a User Page
A user page is a page about a wiki user, someone who registered on the wiki and is likely to be a wiki contributor as well. If you have registered, you can create your own user page. Your user page is linked at the top of the Personal tools section of the navigation bar to the right. More importantly, others will see links to your user page from various places which assist wiki collaboration. They include the 'Recent changes' and page 'history' displays (See Help:Recent changes). You can also link to your user page within the text of a wiki page, which is mainly useful on talk pages when you Sign your name.

Creating your user page
This will help other users and contributors learn about you and your interest in family history. You must be signed in to create your user page.


 * 1) Using the navigation bar on the right side of the page, expand Personal Tools by clicking on the arrow out to the right.
 * 2) The first item you see under Personal Tools should be your username. Click on this, and it will take you to your user page. (You may find it helpful to 'right click' on your user name, and open your user page in a new tab. This will let you keep this page open while you 'see' your user page.)
 * 3) Before you make your first edit to your user page, a message may display there saying "This page has not been created yet." Do not let that confuse you; just click on Edit This Page and begin typing.

What to put on your user page
User pages are just as flexible as any other wiki page, and your user page is a page all about you, so you are allowed to write your user page in whatever format you prefer. Think of it as a 'profile' page. It is a feature in the wiki for the purpose of helping other people know who wiki contributors are and to help bring the online community closer together. You might like to mention where you are from and what your job is. You can also state what your main areas of interest are in relation to the topic of the wiki and describe contributions you have made or areas where you are interested in contributing.

Userboxes
Many users share with others their language skills and/or other interests by displaying boxes on their user page. User boxes are small, colorful boxes that denote membership in a group or expertise in a specific area. Be sure to go to the User box gallery to see if there are boxes there that are appropriate for display on your user page. They require the use of "wiki text" to place on your page. You can also create user boxes for use on your page.

User scratchpad/development area
Creating your user page allows you to have a scratchpad space - an area for developing ideas without cluttering the main namespace. This is called a sandbox. You may create your own user sandbox. You may find it useful as a working area you can use before making edits to articles in the main namespace. You can also use the FamilySearch Wiki:Sandbox page for quick (non-permanent) wiki experimentation.

Helping others find you
If you are involved in a community where individuals know your full name and would like to help others find your user page by searching on your name, you can create a new page with the title of your full name, then create a redirect to your user page. This will bring your user page up first in the search results if other users search on your name.

Other people's user pages
As mentioned above, you will see links to other people's user pages in various places throughout the wiki.

User Contributions
When viewing another person's user page, an additional link, "user contributions", appears in the 'toolbox' area (bottom right). This takes you to a list of all of this user's wiki edits. Use this to get an idea of how prolific a contributor somebody is or to track down edits made by a user who is causing trouble making bad wiki edits.

Editing someone else's page
It's generally considered poor etiquette to rewrite or reword another person's user page. Editing is not disallowed, but you should avoid adding information (or especially opinions) which might be misinterpreted as coming from that user in situations where this could potentially cause a problem. Some types of edits are widely acceptable and unlikely to cause any problems:


 * Fixing wiki links when a page has been moved or deleted
 * Fixing broken external links
 * Categorizing or fixing categories of user pages.

User talk pages
Every user page has an associated talk page; a "user talk page". This is a special kind of talk page for leaving messages directed to a particular user. See User Talk pages.