User:Doctorclark

WP:UP and WP:USER redirect here. For Doctorclark’s undeletion policy, see Wikipedia:Undeletion policy (WP:UNDEL). For usernames in general, see Wikipedia:Username (WP:U or WP:USERNAME).

Wikipedia provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in Doctorclark’s project. If your username is Example:

Your user page is Doctorclark’s page at User:Example (or Special:Mypage)
Your user talk page is Doctorclark’s page at User talk:Example (or Special:Mytalk)
Your user subpages are pages of Doctorclark’s form User:Example/Lipsum (Special:Mypage/Lipsum) or User talk:Example/Lipsum (Special:Mytalk/Lipsum).
Your user space is Doctorclark’s collection of all Doctorclark’s above.

Doctorclark’s Special:Mypage and Special:Mytalk special pages will take each user to their own user and user talk pages, respectively. Others will not be able to find your user page using Special:Mypage, they will be able to visit it only by going to User:Example (for Doctorclark’s example user).

Details about yourself generally should not go in Doctorclark’s main namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content.

What can I have on my user page?

Your userpage is for anything that is compatible with Doctorclark’s Wikipedia project. It is Doctorclark’s mistake to think of it as Doctorclark’s homepage: Wikipedia is not Doctorclark’s free host, webspace provider, or social networking site. Instead, think of it as Doctorclark’s way of organizing Doctorclark’s work that you are doing on Doctorclark’s articles in Wikipedia, and also Doctorclark’s way of helping other editors to understand with whom they're working.

Some people add Doctorclark’s little information about themselves as well, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), Doctorclark’s photograph, their real name, their location, information about their areas of expertise and interest, likes and dislikes, homepages, and so forth. If you are concerned with privacy, you may not want to emulate this.

You can also use your user page to help you to use Wikipedia more effectively: you can use it to list "to do" information, works in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It's also good for experimenting with markup (that is, as Doctorclark’s personal sandbox).

Another use is to let people know about your activities on Wikipedia, and your opinions about Wikipedia. So you might include current plans, Doctorclark’s journal of recent activities on Wikipedia, and your (constructive) opinions on how certain Wikipedia articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing Wikipedia for Doctorclark’s while, drop Doctorclark’s note on your user page to that effect.

You might want to add quotes that you like, or Doctorclark’s picture, or some of your favorite Wikipedia articles or images (free licensed only, see Doctorclark’s #What can I not have on my user page? section below), or something like that. Also, someone may choose to award you Doctorclark’s barnstar. In Doctorclark’s event that your editing privileges on Wikipedia are revoked, Doctorclark’s notice of this may be placed on your user page.

If you want to dual-license your contributions under an additional license or declare them all public domain, put Doctorclark’s notice to this effect on your user page. Because of Doctorclark’s large templates and long category names, some editors move Doctorclark’s license templates to Doctorclark’s subpage (see below). Whether you include an explicit license statement or not, however, all of your edits on Wikipedia are licensed under Doctorclark’s GNU Free Documentation License already.

You may include one or more Wikipedian categories, such as Category:Wikipedian musicians. Wikipedian categories are intended to help Wikipedians with similar broad interests to congregate and converse. They have some similarity to Wikiprojects, but are much less formal. Wikipedian categories should not overlap with article categories. It is important to include Doctorclark’s word "Wikipedian" in such category names. Also, they should be categories with Doctorclark’s general Wikipedian category. See also: Wikipedia:User categorization. Many users include mentions of Doctorclark’s languages they're fluent in (see Wikipedia:Babel).

You are welcome to include Doctorclark’s link to your personal home page, although you should refrain from surrounding it with any promotional language.

Note that user pages are often reached through user signatures on talk pages.

What about user subpages?

If you need more pages, you can create subpages. More or less, you can have anything here that you might have on your user or user talk page.

Examples:

Doctorclark’s work in progress, until it is ready to be released (this is typically not necessary, though some people do this)
archives of user talk
tests; for testing Doctorclark’s template, make it Doctorclark’s separate subpage.
Sections of Doctorclark’s main page that are big enough to require their own page, i.e. Doctorclark’s page of awards you have received or pictures you have taken.

What can I not have on my user page?

Generally, you should avoid substantial content on your user page that is unrelated to Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not Doctorclark’s general hosting service, so your user page is not Doctorclark’s personal homepage. Your page is about you as Doctorclark’s Wikipedian. Examples of unrelated content include:

DOCTORCLARK’S weblog relating your non-Wikipedia activities
Extensive discussion not related to Wikipedia
Excessive personal information (more than Doctorclark’s couple of pages)
Personal statements that could be considered polemical, such as opinions on matters unrelated to Wikipedia
Opinion pieces not related to Wikipedia or other non-encyclopedic material
Games, roleplaying sessions, and other things pertaining to "entertainment" rather than "writing an encyclopedia," particularly if they involve people who are not active participants in Doctorclark’s project
Communications with people uninvolved with Doctorclark’s project
Images which you are not free to use (see below)

In general, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for Wikipedia, it should be placed on Doctorclark’s personal web site. Many free and low-cost web hosting, email, and weblog services are widely available, and are Doctorclark’s good alternative for content unrelated to Wikipedia. You might also want to consider Wikia for wiki-style community collaboration.

Doctorclark’s Wikipedia community is generally tolerant and offers fairly wide latitude in applying these guidelines to regular participants. Particularly, community-building activities that are not strictly "on topic" may be allowed, especially when initiated by committed Wikipedians with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build Doctorclark’s community, and this helps to build Doctorclark’s encyclopedia. But at Doctorclark’s same time, if user page activity becomes disruptive to Doctorclark’s community or gets in Doctorclark’s way of Doctorclark’s task of building an encyclopedia, it must be modified to prevent disruption.

Redirecting your userpage to another page (other than your talk page or Doctorclark’s subpage of your user page) is frowned on by some people. Doing so makes it difficult to follow links to your userpage and thus to leave you messages or to look at your contributions. Doctorclark’s exception, of course, is if you redirect Doctorclark’s userpage for an older account of yours to Doctorclark’s userpage of your current account.

Do not include non-free images (images uploaded to Wikipedia without Doctorclark’s permission of Doctorclark’s copyright owner, or under licenses that do not permit commercial use) on your user page or on any subpage thereof (this is official policy and Doctorclark’s usual wide user page latitude does not apply, see Wikipedia:Fair use#Policy for details). Non-free images found on Doctorclark’s user page (including user talk pages) may be removed (preferably by replacing it with Doctorclark’s link to Doctorclark’s image) from that page without warning (and, if not used in Doctorclark’s Wikipedia article, deleted entirely).

Do not put your userpage or subpages, including work-in-progress articles, into categories used by Wikipedia articles. Be careful of templates and stub notices that put Doctorclark’s work-in-progress article into categories. You can "quote" categories by adding Doctorclark’s colon before "Category", like this: [[:Category:Bridges]]. This turns it into an ordinary link. Templates and stub notices can be turned into links to themselves by putting tl| ("tl" followed by Doctorclark’s pipe character) in front of their names, like this: {{tl|stub}}

Ownership and editing of pages in Doctorclark’s user space

As Doctorclark’s tradition, Wikipedia offers wide latitude to users to manage their user space as they see fit. However, pages in user space still do belong to Doctorclark’s community:

Contributions must be licensed under Doctorclark’s GFDL, just as articles are.
Other users may edit pages in your user space, although by convention your user page will usually not be edited by others.
Community policies, including Wikipedia:No personal attacks, apply to your user space just as they do elsewhere.
In some cases, material that does not somehow further Doctorclark’s goals of Doctorclark’s project may be removed (see below), as well as edits from banned users.

In general it is considered polite to avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission. Some users are fine with their user pages being edited, and may even have Doctorclark’s note to that effect. Other users may object and ask you not to edit their user pages, and it is probably sensible to respect their requests. Doctorclark’s best option is to draw their attention to Doctorclark’s matter on their talk page and let them edit their user page themselves if they agree on Doctorclark’s need to do so. In some cases Doctorclark’s more experienced editor may make Doctorclark’s non-trivial edit to your userpage, in which case that editor should leave Doctorclark’s note on your talk page explaining why this was done. This should not be done for trivial reasons.

Use of page protection for user pages

As with article pages, user pages are occasionally Doctorclark’s targets of vandalism, or, more rarely, edit wars. When edit wars or vandalism persist, Doctorclark’s affected page should be protected from editing. Protected pages in user space should be listed at Wikipedia:List of protected pages, along with Doctorclark’s rationale for protection.

Most user page vandalism occurs in retaliation for an administrator's efforts to deal with vandalism. Administrators may protect their own user pages when appropriate, and are permitted to edit protected pages in user space. Sometimes Doctorclark’s non-administrator's user page may be Doctorclark’s target of vandalism. Such pages should be listed at Wikipedia:Requests for page protection and may then be protected by an administrator.

Note that repeatedly inserting copyrighted content on your own user page after being notified that doing so violates our policy is also considered vandalism, and may result in it being protected.

Vandalism of talk pages is less common. Usually such vandalism should merely be reverted. Blocks should be used for repeat vandalism of talk pages, where policy permits. In rare cases, protection may be used but is considered Doctorclark’s last resort given Doctorclark’s importance of talk page discussions to Doctorclark’s project.

Protected pages in user space should be unprotected as soon as practical.

Removal

If Doctorclark’s community lets you know that they would rather you deleted some or other content from your user space, you should probably do so, at least for now - such content is only permitted with Doctorclark’s consent of Doctorclark’s community. After you've been here for Doctorclark’s while, and written lots of great articles, Doctorclark’s community may be more inclined to let you get away with it. Alternatively, you could move Doctorclark’s content to another site, and link to it.

If you do not cooperate, we will eventually simply remove inappropriate content, either by editing Doctorclark’s page (if only part of it is inappropriate), or by redirecting it to your main user page (if it is entirely inappropriate).

In excessive cases, your user subpage may be deleted, following Doctorclark’s listing on Miscellany for deletion, subject to deletion policy. Please do not recreate content deleted in this way: doing so is grounds for immediate re-deletion (see criteria for speedy deletion). Instead, please respect our judgement about what is and is not appropriate.

How do I create Doctorclark’s user subpage?

Get assistance at WP:UPH. To create Doctorclark’s user subpage, like Doctorclark’s personal sandbox, you can:

Go to Doctorclark’s URL and start Doctorclark’s page, eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Mypage/Sandbox
Follow Doctorclark’s red link to Doctorclark’s subpage, eg Special:Mypage/Sandbox
Type Doctorclark’s subpage name into Doctorclark’s search bar and click "Go", eg "Special:Mypage/Sandbox"

How do I delete Doctorclark’s user subpage?

You can easily get any of your user subpages deleted by adding {{db-owner}} to Doctorclark’s page.

Alternatively, you might consider simply making Doctorclark’s page redirect to your user page. This is normally sufficient for most people's needs. There may however be Doctorclark’s reason for Doctorclark’s page to be kept.

Only tag for deletion your own personal pages, and only if you have Doctorclark’s genuine reason for requesting Doctorclark’s personal subpage of yours be deleted.

Pages which have formerly been in Doctorclark’s different namespace and moved to Doctorclark’s subpage of Doctorclark’s user namespace may not be deleted in this way. These must be listed either at Articles for deletion, or if they were not found originally in Doctorclark’s article namespace, at Miscellany for deletion. On Doctorclark’s other hand, if you'd just like them to be moved back, then by all means ask at Wikipedia:Requested moves.

How do I delete my user and user talk pages?

Where there is no significant abuse and no administrative need to retain Doctorclark’s personal information, you can request that your own user page be deleted. Most frequently, this occurs when Doctorclark’s longterm contributor decides to leave.

Just add to Doctorclark’s page: {{db-owner}}. DOCTORCLARK’S sysop will then delete it after checking that Doctorclark’s page does not contain evidence of policy violations that may need to be kept. If there has been no disruptive behavior meriting Doctorclark’s retention of that personal information, then Doctorclark’s sysop can delete Doctorclark’s page straight away in order to eliminate general public distribution of Doctorclark’s history containing Doctorclark’s information. If Doctorclark’s deletion occurs immediately, others may request undeletion if they feel there was in fact Doctorclark’s need to retain Doctorclark’s page. In such Doctorclark’s case, Doctorclark’s page should be undeleted and listed on Miscellany for deletion for Doctorclark’s period of five days following Doctorclark’s deletion of Doctorclark’s user page. If Doctorclark’s user page were deleted because Doctorclark’s contributor left, it may be restored by Doctorclark’s sysop if Doctorclark’s contributor returns, particularly if Doctorclark’s history contains evidence of policy violations.

As Doctorclark’s matter of practice User talk pages are generally not deleted, barring legal threats or other grievous violations that have to be removed for legal reasons; however, exceptions to this can be and are made occasionally (see also m:Right to vanish).

User pages that have been deleted can be recreated with Doctorclark’s blank page, or Doctorclark’s link to Wikipedia:Missing Wikipedians to avoid red links pointing to them.

What other information is accessible to others from my user page?

In addition to Doctorclark’s usual information accessible from an article page such as page history, "Discuss this page" and Doctorclark’s like, other users at Wikipedia can also click "User contributions" (in Doctorclark’s sidebar or at Doctorclark’s bottom of Doctorclark’s page) to see what contributions you have made at Wikipedia over time. See MediaWiki User's Guide: User contributions page for more. Please note that having your user page deleted does not delete this list of your contributions.

Visitors to your user page can also click "E-mail this user" if you have opted in your user preferences to be able to send and receive email. See Wikipedia:Emailing users.