Help:Signatures

Signing your posts on talk pages, both in the article and non-article namespaces, is a good practice and facilitates discussion, by helping identify the author of a particular comment. Other users can then navigate to a talk page and address their comments to the specific, relevant user(s). Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing, because it helps all users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.

When editing a page, main namespace articles should not be signed, because the article is a shared work, based on the contributions of many people and one editor should not be singled out above others.

When Should Signatures Not be Used?

Any posts made to the user talk pages, article talk pages and any other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures on Wikipedia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any article. Rather, the page history takes care of the need to identify edits with users. Therefore, signatures should not be used in edit summaries, as they do not translate from ~~~~. In other instances, when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.