Help:Signatures

This is part of the Utopia WIKI Help Guide Series.

This Page references Utopia Wiki's official guide to Signatures. Please use common sense.

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.

How to sign your posts

Preferred option

Using four tildes

There are two ways to sign your posts:

1. At the end of your comments, simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~.
2. If you are using the edit toolbar option (it usually appears above the edit screen as a default), If the browser's settings don't allow JavaScript, the icons appear only if the settings are changed. If the browser is set not to show pictures, the icon can be found on "Your signature with timestamp". Click it to add the four tildes.

Your signature will appear, after you have saved the changes. The end result is the same in both cases.

Typing four tildes will result in the following: Example (talk) 20:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Other options

Using three tildes

Typing three tildes results in the following: [User:Example|Example]] (talk)

However, since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may only wish to sign this way when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code), when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Using five tildes

Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

20:11, 30 April 2024 (UTC)

Note that if you choose to contribute to Wikipedia without logging in, you should still sign your posts. In this case, your IP address will take the place of your username. Your IP address might look something like this: 192.0.2.58. Some users prefer to use their IP address, instead of a user name, because they think that an IP provides them with more anonymity.