Help:Talk page

From A Wheel of Time Wiki

Talk pages are places for communicating with other editors and discussions about articles or policies. These links will be helpful:

• Wikipedia:Talk page guidelines- rules of thumbs, advice and policy for conducting one self on a talk page; the verbal wars can rage hot, and it can be hard to stay cool, and it is easy to say things that will haunt one. Heed this page well!
• Wikipedia:Sign your posts on talk pages- signing is a great courtesy to everyone, to yourself(since you can follow your own words and keep track of dates), for the other readers (so they know who said it, when), and for later visitors (they can follow the conversations, and they can fix the formatting if need be). It is so easy to do! A mere 4 tildes is all it takes: ~~~~ .
• Wikipedia:Refactoring talk pages- Cleaning up old discussions
• Wikipedia:How to archive a talk page- What to do when a talk page grows to monstrous proportions.

[edit] Formatting

Talk pages are formatted differently from articles; this serves to differentiate discussion from actual facts and articles. As well, the two serve different purposes.

• In a Talk page, everyone should sign their contributions (unlike an article).
• Wiki markup should be used as much as possible. Gratuitous HTML markup makes the source of the article harder to understand, more difficult to edit, and possibly conflicts with various pieces of software. Besides that, it is inconsistent. So, for example, whenever you see <i>Foo</i>, convert that to ''Foo''.
• Spelling and grammar should be up to that of an article. Other people besides the direct discussers read Talk pages as well, and a ugly, ill-spelled, ungrammatical monstrosity reflects poorly on the wiki as a whole.
• Follow the format of the "Post a comment" link. On an article page, there should be no spaces in the headers, but in a Talk there should be. Likewise, in an article, there should be no blank lines between a header and its content, whereas on Talk pages, there should be one blank line between a section header and and two blank lines after the end of the section and the header beginning the next.
• Speaking of the headers, all the comments should fall into a section. If it isn't worth putting into a section of its own, then the comment may be too trivial and should be removed. The ultimate goal of Talk pages is improving articles, not to gossip.
• Links should always be enclosed in single brackets and given a name where the webaddress is not the important part.
• When quoting the article or another, follow the Help:Style guide.
• Some people prefer to put a discussion between two people in an alternating indentation format, like so:

Foo. --1

Foobar. --2

Blaxos. --1

But what happens when multiple people are talking simultaneously, at widely varied times? This simple model falls apart. It is better to "thread" messages, like in an email client, so complex examples form a sort of tree:

Foo. --1

Foobar. --2

Foobat. --1

Bat. --3

Bar? --4

Meep. --2

Blaxthos. --5

Thos. --1

Zork. --5

Baa? --1

In general, it is preferrable to use colons : to indent your comments, rather than bullet points. Including a blank line before your new comment improves readability considerably.