Harry Potter Wiki:User Policy

Shortcut: HPW:USER

The Harry Potter Wiki's User policy is meant to encourage users to work more on articles, and not spend all of their time on customizing their userpages as well as informing users of their responsibilities.

User pages

Your user page is not your primary contribution to this wiki.

However, user pages do serve a useful purpose, and regular users are encouraged to create a userpage which gives some information about themselves, and helps organize their contributions to the Harry Potter Wiki. For example, they may wish list their collection of Harry Potter references, advertise contributions they are proud of, or list articles they intend to work on. They may also include their user name on other wikis or Harry Potter fan sites, link to a personal page on another site, list the languages they speak, or talk about their favorite Harry Potter characters. For more information on what userpages can be used for, see Wikipedia:User page.

Many users also enjoy writing about their imaginary persona in the Harry Potter universe. This is neither encouraged nor discouraged. However, Harry Potter Wiki users who work exclusively on their fan fiction, and do not wish to contribute significantly to any articles, are strongly encouraged to use the Harry Potter Fanon Wiki instead. Users who work exclusively on user page content unrelated to Harry Potter or the Harry Potter Wiki should, likewise, find somewhere else to host their webpages. The Harry Potter Wiki does accept Fanon for a full article per the Canon policy.

Thus, we discourage users from working primarily on user pages. All users and their user pages must comply with the following rules:

Rules for user page use

User pages in violation of the following policies will be edited or deleted in order to comply with these policies. Users repeatedly in violation of these rules may be blocked according to Harry Potter Wiki:Blocking policy's rules for registered users who post fanon.

User page fan fiction must be restricted to either the main user page or a single subpage. This does not mean a user can put fanon on both a user page and a subpage, or on a series of subpages. Users who want to make more than one fan fiction page are encouraged to use the Harry Potter Fanon Wiki instead.
1. It is strongly encouraged that these pages be marked with either the {{Fanon user page}} template, or with the {{Fanonstart}} and {{Fanonend}} templates.
2. User page fan fiction is limited to 250 words or less.
3. Users violating the policy on user page fan fiction will be reminded of the relevant sections of this document, and of the existence of the fanon wiki.
User pages and images within must be "safe for work": no content which is unsuitable for a family audience or would be likely to disturb or offend other users. Any illegal or inappropriate content or links to such material is forbidden.
User subpages not containing fan fiction may be kept, subject to the user image policy and some usefulness to the project
1. Specifically allowed are:
  1. Personal sandbox
  2. To do list
  3. Contributions page
  4. Toolbox (maintenance tasks, useful templates, etc.)
  5. Signature page
User subpages unrelated to Harry Potter or the Harry Potter Wiki are not allowed.
1. Specifically not alllowed include:
  1. Weblogs
  2. Guestbooks
2. Likewise, a guestbook section or a weblog should not be put on a user's main page.
User pages must not be put in categories which would cause them to be mistaken for "real" articles. Likewise, {{Title}} must not be used to make the userpage appear to be a "real" article.
1. User's main page may be put in any user category (Cat:Users)
Secondary accounts set up primarily in order to have a second user page are disallowed, according to the Sock puppetry policy page.
1. If a user wishes to change his or her name, their old pages must be either moved to subpages of the new user name's page, or deleted. The original user page may be kept, if content is restricted to a note redirecting the reader to the new user name.

User talk page

Deleting other user's comments?

User image policy

User signature policy

Signature Help

Alright. First of all you can customize your formula in general by going into your preferences (on the top right). There it says signature. You can either type in what you want your signature to be there or you can type {{subst:User:'''your username'''/sig}}. The latter choice will take that user page of yours and substitute it whenever you use ~~~~.

If you choose to just type it in there you again have two choices. Either a "raw" signature or not. A raw signature you have to type all the links in for yourself while if it is not raw it will automatically link everything you type to your userpage. A raw signature allows multiple links in a signature. My signature is very simple and is just typed in (in "raw" mode) as -- [[User:DarkJedi613|DarkJedi613]] ([[User_talk:DarkJedi613|Talk]]). If you plan to do any colors, etc. I suggest you use the template version above.

So you would create a page at User:'''Your username'''/sig and put whatever you wanted on it. Generally to do styling you have to use font tags or style tags. I suggest style tags. There is a pretty good tutorial here. An example signature might be: -- [[User:DarkJedi613|DarkJedi613]] ([[User talk:DarkJedi613|Talk]]) (Look below for what it looks like.)

-- DarkJedi613 ^(Talk) 14:42, 4 June 2008 (UTC)