Help:Using talk pages

 ( Wikipedia Basic Information ) 

A talk page (also known as a discussion page) is a page which editors can use to discuss improvements to an article or other Wikipedia page.

The talk page associated with an article is named "Talk:Example", where "Example" is the name of the article. For example, the talk page for discussion of improvements to the article Australia is named . The talk page associated with a page in another namespace is named by adding "talk" after the namespace label; for example, the talk page for About is called .

also have associated talk pages (for example, ). When other editors need to contact you, they will usually do this by leaving a message on . When someone has left you a message that way, you will see an orange information notice the next time you log in or view a page on Wikipedia.

If the "discussion" link is , it means no talk page has been started yet. Click the red link to begin a talk page for that article. (It is also possible for a talk page to exist while the corresponding non-talk page is a red link; this often occurs in , when a user has received talk page messages but has not started a user page yet.)

To go back to the article page from its talk page, use the leftmost tab at the top of the page, labeled "article". For pages other than articles, this tab may say something different, like "user page" or "project page".

To respond to a discussion already in progress, add your comment below the last entry in the discussion. If you want to respond to a specific comment, you can place your response directly below it. When doing this, keep in mind the advice given below about indentation.

Comments are indented using one or more initial colons (:). Each colon represents one level of indentation. You will see these colons in the wikitext when editing a talk page, but when viewing the page itself you will see the indents.

The first comment in a section will have no colons before it. When you reply to a statement, you should use one more colon than the number that appear in the statement you're replying to. For example, if you're replying to a statement that has 2 colons before it, your response should have 3 colons before it.

The following is an example of a talk page discussion using indentation. The text typed in the edit box is shown on the left, and the resulting display on the right.

How's the soup? --John
     

     
It's great!! --Jane
     
:I made it myself! --John
     
Let's move the discussion to . --Jane
     

     
I tend to disagree. --George
     
     

If you wish to reply to a comment that has already been replied to, place your response below the last response, while still only adding one colon to the number of colons preceding the statement you're replying to. In this example, note that Jane, George and Jim are each responding to Johns comment.

How's the soup? --John
     

     
It's great!! --Jane
     
Not too bad.. --George
     
     

     

     
Terrible. --Jim
     
     

Note that comments are displayed closer together when indented by the same amount (see George's reply in the example above). This can cause confusion to readers glancing through a conversation thread, since several multi-line comments can be mistaken for a single comment. To produce normal paragraph spacing, add a linebreak first as Jim has done.

The next example shows a more complex discussion. Even though Jane has responded to John first, and Elliot responded to Jane, we can still easily see that George's comment is meant to be in response to John's original question:

How's the soup? --John
     

     
It's great!! --Jane
     
:Just how great was it? --Elliot
     
::Really great! --Jane
     
Not too bad.. --George
     
:I thought it was a little bad... --Sam
     
     

Note that if your comment consists of more than one paragraph, you must repeat the colons at the start of each paragraph. An alternative is to type the new paragraph tag <p> in the wikitext instead of starting a new line.

When a long discussion has many indents, the discussion may be awkward to read, particularly on smaller screens. Eventually, for everyone's convenience, a replying editor will "start over" by responding without any colons at all. The template can be used for this purpose.

On talk pages that generate significant amounts of discussion, old discussions are often archived to keep the size of the talk page at a manageable level. This may be done either manually or with the help of a bot. An archive box with links to the discussion archives is normally placed at the top of the current talk page.

Quotations

An easy way to do this is to use the or templates. Write {{quotation|Quoted passage from the article.}} to produce

{{Quotation|quoted text| Who said it| Source}}    (Creates the above box.)

{{Quote|quoted text| Who said it| Source, page ___}}    (Indented with no box, make Source in italics.)

{{Quote|quoted text| Source, page __}}    (Indented with no box.)

Boxes – general

Plain box (can also be used in article):

Colored box (green – talk page only):

Talk page graphics

{{done}}  creates 

{{ESp|pd}}  creates 

{{ESp|n}}  creates 

{{ESp|?}}  creates 

{{fixed}}  creates 

{{ESp|q}}  creates 

{{outdent}}  creates a carry-over line to begin discussion at far left.

• Introduction to talk pages
• Talk page guidelines
• Talk page layout
• Archiving a talk page
• "Communicating with Your Fellow Editors", a chapter in
• LiquidThreads