Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Personal Subpages

As shown in Figure 3-5, once you’re registered and logged on, Wikipedia shows, in the screen’s upper right, a link to your personal page (click your user name). There’s also a link to your user talk page (click “my talk”), which is described in detail as described in Chapter 8 (starting on User Talk Page Postings). This page is for other editors to talk to you. These two standard links are in red if not yet created, or in blue, if they exist.

You’re not limited to one personal page in Wikipedia (or two, if you count the user talk page, but that’s really a discussion page, not a page for you to play with). You can create additional personal pages if you want. In Wikipedia, these additional pages are called subpages.

Warning

Don’t use the techniques in this section to create a subpage of an article. Although you can create such a subpage, an administrator will soon either move or delete it. Don’t create such a subpage as a test—that’s considered vandalism. It wastes the time of editors who monitor new page creation, and of administrators, who are the only people who can delete Wikipedia pages.

Creating Your Personal Sandbox

In Chapter 1, while editing the common sandbox, you saw the problem of an edit conflict (???). Creating your own page to practice at—that is, your own sandbox—takes care of the edit conflict problem. You also don’t see any of the standard warnings or hidden text that come with the common sandbox. Plus it’s good practice ...