Using talk pages

From Chester Wiki

Every article on Chester Wiki has an associated talk page for discussing that article. Talk pages are not chat boards or comment areas; they're for coordinating editorial decisions, suggesting new material that should be considered, and generally collaborating on making a great article.

If you have new information for an article, by all means plunge forward and edit that page. But if there are multiple people working on an article, it can help to use the talk page to divide up tasks and hammer out differences.

[edit] Talk page formatting

You can get to the talk page for an article by clicking on the discussion tab when reading an article.

You edit talk pages just like editing any other page in Chester Wiki; see how to edit a page for instructions. When using talk pages, add new paragraphs at the bottom of the page.

If there are already conversations going on on that page, it can help to add a new heading, like this:

==Whatever==

...so that there's a visual distinction between topics of discussion.

You should sign your posts on talk pages, so people know who they're talking to. You can use three tildes ("~~~") for just your user name, or four tildes ("~~~~") for your user name and the time and date. Unless there's a good reason, use the four-tilde signature.

Responses to other people's talk should be indented. You can use a colon (":") at the beginning of a paragraph to indent that paragraph. Responses to responses should be indented twice (two colons); responses to responses to responses get indented three times. Hopefully we don't get that much farther in a discussion, but if so, well, continue in that pattern.

[edit] User talk pages

The discussion page for a user page is special; it's called a user talk page. You can use user talk pages to leave someone in particular a personal message. Don't forget that they're publicly accessible, and anyone can read them. Try to keep discussions about a particular article on that article's talk page, too.

[edit] Etiquette

There are some points of etiquette in using talk pages that have built up over the years. Here are a few:

• Unlike everything else in Chester Wiki, it's considered bad form to change someone else's posts on a talk page -- even to correct spelling or grammar.
• It's usually perfectly OK, though, to change something you wrote on a talk page, for any reason. If you made spelling or grammatical errors, feel free to change them.
• If, in the heat of the moment, you said something you regret, go ahead and change that, too.
• Conversely, Forgive And Forget when someone changes a nasty comment to something more civil and productive.
• As an exception, it's impolite to remove a comment if someone's responded to it. It makes them look ridiculous.
• In general, conversations aren't deleted from talk pages but are instead archived when they are old or no longer relevant. To archive discussions simply create a new page such as User talk:Mypage/Archive and copy the old discussions to it.has an associated talk page for discussing that article. Talk pages are not chat boards or comment areas; they're for coordinating editorial decisions, suggesting new material that should be considered, and generally collaborating on making a great article.

If you have new information for an article, by all means then go for it and edit that page. But if there are multiple people working on an article, it can help to use the talk page to divide up tasks and hammer out differences.