Help:Talk page

Talk pages
Every page, that is not itself a talk page, has (potentially) an associated talk page in the corresponding talk namespace.


 * Talk pages for regular articles are used to discuss changes to the article.


 * User talk pages are used to leave messages for a particular user. "You have new messages" is automatically displayed on all pages that the user views, until the user talk pages is viewed by the user.

Please sign your posts on talk pages. Use  (two dashes followed by four tildes) to produce e.g. "--Mikk 06:44, 23 August 2006 (EDT)".

It is also customary to indent responses to a previous post to emulate a threaded view of e.g. mail or forums posts:

Use the full page name
When discussing the name of the page or discussing merging it with another page, always mention the current page name: after renaming (moving) a page with its talk page, references to "this page name" would not make sense.

Quickly posting new discussions
The "Post a comment" feature allows convenient appending of a section with the section header the same as the edit summary, and typed only once.


 * Hint: The "new section" feature also works on other than talk pages; there's just no link for it. Use the url directly, e.g. . Click the tab and then append "&section=new" to the resulting URL!

Talk namespaces
What differentiates a talk page from a regular page?

Except for special pages, each namespace has an associated talk namespace. The talk namespaces are designated by adding talk: to the normal prefix. Examples:
 * The talk page for "Main Page" is "Talk:Main Page"
 * The talk page for "User:TerranRich" is "User talk:TerranRich"
 * The talk page for "Project:Guidelines" is "Project talk:Guidelines"