Wikipedia: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Communicating with Your Fellow Editors

As a Wikipedia editor, you need to know how to use the pages where editors interact and collaborate with each other. Even if you want to focus mostly on improving articles, you’ll find that discussing those improvements with other editors before, during, and after your actual article work goes a long way in making sure your changes are accurate and don’t get reverted later.

Dealing with vandalism (Chapter 7) and content disputes (Chapter 10) also require you to use article and user talk pages. As a Wikipedia editor, you’ll communicate with other editors on article talk pages and user talk pages—including your own. You can also, if you wish, communicate directly with other editors by email and in online chat rooms.

All these methods of communication involve standard procedures and norms of conduct. If you don’t follow them, other editors are much more likely to ignore what you’re saying, as valuable as it may be. This chapter spells out those processes and norms so you can make your points easily and clearly.

Identifying Yourself

When you post a comment to a talk page, you must always sign your comment. Other editors need to know who posted what, and when, so they can follow the thread of a conversation, post on a user talk page if appropriate, and even just know whether a posting is worth responding to. (A comment that’s more than a month old is presumed to be of historical interest only if it’s no longer part of an ongoing discussion.) ...