Help:User Page

For New Contributors, Adopters 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 few short paragraphs about your research interests, places you worked, or societies where 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 further.

What is a User Page
A user page is a page about a wiki contributor. If you have editing rights, you can create your own user page. 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 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) Your user name at the top right side of a Wiki page is the link to your user page.
 * 2) You may find it helpful to 'right click' on your user name to 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 saying "This page has not been created yet." Do not let that confuse you; just click on Edit This Page and begin typing.

NOTE: It's important that your user page displays your username. Do not use the DISPLAYTITLE template to overwrite the name of your user page. Other Wiki users need to be able to see a Wiki contributor's username. If you wish to display your own name on your user page, list your name using a header one at the top of your page. (i.e., = Your Name =)

What to put on your user page
User pages are flexible like other Wiki pages. Your user page is a page all about you, so you're allowed to write your user page in whatever format you prefer. 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 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 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 that are appropriate for display on your user page. They require the use of "wiki text" to be placed 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 to use the sandbox before making edits to the articles in the main namespace. You can also go to your own Personal Sandbox under Volunteer and Helper on the Navigation bar on the left side of this page. For further instruction see: FamilySearch Wiki:About the Sandbox.

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 is or to track down edits made by a user who is causing trouble making inappropriate 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. To communicate with a User, instead use their User's Talk page.

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.