Wikipedia talk:Signatures

src: i.ytimg.com

Video Wikipedia talk:Signatures

Clarifying the project page

The project page (Wikipedia:Signatures) includes some things that I have questions about.

Customizing how everyone sees your signature: If you wish to include the pipe (|) or equals (=) characters, these must be escaped, or they will break templates unexpectedly when your signature is present. To escape the | symbol, you can use | and to escape the = character, = will work.

Well, I just configured my signature as

and it works fine. It will appear at the end of this posting, after which I will revert to the default signature. Is the escape requirement because it works fine on talk pages, but there are templates that involve user signatures? Which templates are those?

Appearance and color: Be sparing with subscript and superscript.

What is that supposed to mean? Lots of signatures use one or both of these techniques. I did find one user who used it recursively, something like

[[User:JoeShmo|JoeShmo]][[User talk:JoeShmo|talk]] -> JoeShmo^{^talk}

And I might agree that  and  should not be nested, but other than that, how is a user to interpret "be sparing with"? Sould we change this to "Do not nest  and  tags"?

Length: The software will automatically truncate both plain and raw signatures to 255 characters of code in the Signature field. If substitution of templates or another page is used, please be careful to verify that you are not violating the length limit, as the software will not do this automatically.

Well, AnemoneProjectors has a signature with {{Subst}}, viz:

-- [[User:AnemoneProjectors|<span style="color:green">{{SUBST:smallcaps|a}}nemone</span>]][[User talk:AnemoneProjectors#top|<span style="color:#BA0000">{{SUBST:Smallcaps|p}}ro{{SUBST:smallcaps|j}}ec{{SUBST:smallcaps|t}}ors</span>]]

-> -- anemoneprojectors

and the markup is below 255 characters, but after substitution, it's way over 255 characters, and it works fine, so what is the warning "please be careful to verify that you are not violating the length limit" supposed to mean? --Anomalocaris =|= Talk =|= 23:16, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: WP:Signatures is a behavioral guideline and policy, not a technical guideline. While not escaping pipes and equals signs technically is accepted by the software, it could potentially cause problems with any templates designed to encapsulate parts of talk pages. The second half of the sentence in the guideline about using subscript and superscript says to avoid cases that change line spacing, which the JoeShmo example doesn't. While AnemoneProjectors's signature isn't caught by the software due to technical limitations, it violates the behavioral guideline. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 23:57, 28 November 2017 (UTC)

Ahecht: Thank you for your reply.

There are equals signs on talk pages, and I'm not aware of any guideline that implies that one should avoid anything like E=MC2 -> E=MC² on a talk page. If it's OK outside a signature, why is it a problem inside a signature?
How can subscript and superscript affect surrounding text? The system does not allow users to save signatures with unclosed tags.
If subscript and superscript really can affect surrounding text, would it make sense to change the point to something like
- Avoid using subscript and superscript in ways that affect the way that surrounding text is displayed.
What behavioral guideline is violated by the signature of AnemoneProjectors? It is less than 255 characters as coded, and it displays as just 19 characters on the screen. What am I missing here?

--Anomalocaris (talk) 01:22, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Substitution must not be used to circumvent the normal restrictions on signature content, including the use of images, obnoxious markup, or excessive length. The limit isn't 255 characters as coded in ones preferences, its 255 characters as it appears in the page source. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 01:55, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

@Ahecht and Anomalocaris: I wasn't aware of this. I really like my smallcaps signature. Is there anything else I can do to keep it? -- anemoneprojectors 09:26, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

I've changed my signature, I'll work on it to see if I can find a way to get it how I like without substing templates. -- anemoneprojectors 09:39, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I'm happy now. Hopefully this one is ok. (p.s. apologies for being slightly off-topic; my own signature can be discussed at User talk:AnemoneProjectors#Your signature) -- ?nemone?ro?ec?ors 09:54, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

@Anomalocaris: In plain talk page discussions (such as the one that we're having here), equals signs and pipes do not cause any problem. The problems can occur when it is not a plain discussion.

For instance, if you close a discussion by using the {{archive top}} template, it's common practice to provide a signed closing summary, as in {{archive top|I've closed this because it's clear that everybody agrees. ~~~~}}. Here, the first positional parameter is the closing statement and signature. Now imagine that your signature has a pipe in it; in such a case, the first positional parameter is the closing statement and first half of your signature, and the second positional parameter is the second half of your signature plus the timestamp - but {{archive top}} doesn't recognise a second positional parameter, so that desirable information is simply not displayed. It makes no difference to utilise the |result=I've closed this because it's clear that everybody agrees. ~~~~ syntax instead - a pipe splits one parameter from the next. Equals signs also cause problems with positional parameters - the part before the equals becomes a parameter name, almost certainly unrecognised; and the part after the equals becomes the value of that unrecognised parameter, so is almost certainly ignored outright.

Another case concerns Requests for comment. Bare pipes do not cause problems in RfC discussions, but if one occurs in the opening statement of an RfC (including within the signature of that statement), it will break the RFC listing pages when the statement is bot-copied over.

In short: we've put these recommendations into WP:CUSTOMSIG because there are demonstrable reasons why going against them is bad practice. --Redrose64 ? (talk) 23:06, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Redrose64: Thank you for clarifying re pipe and equals. I welcome your thoughts on subscript and superscript, and on the use of {{Subst}} to sneak around the 255-character limit. --Anomalocaris (talk) 23:43, 29 November 2017 (UTC)

Because it's extremely annoying to the point of potential WP:DE if someone's signature severely disrupts the rendering of the page, or if the signature is an inordinate amount of wikitext when editing the page. Anomie? 21:20, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

Anomie: Sure, but I have yet to see anyone offer an example of the use of subscript or superscript that disrupts the rendering of a page, remembering that the system won't accept signature strings with missing end tags. --Anomalocaris (talk) 23:38, 1 December 2017 (UTC)

I think nesting is one of the issues (for example:

the quick red fox the quick red fox the quick red fox
the quick red fox the quick red fox the quick red fox
the quick red fox the quick^{Xyzzy^Xyzzy} red fox the_{xyzzy_xyzzy} quick red fox
the quick red fox the quick red fox the quick red fox)

but maybe also sub/superscripts containing other acceptable markup - or characters with strange sizes?

As to length the specific 255 limit is historical, "back in the day" a 64k page was considered too long, and it was important to save bandwidth and, to some extent, disk space. In addition, and this has not changed (except that some people use VE), too much ("source" being sigs makes the wikitext harder to read. Other wikis encourage the use of templates for precisely this reason.

All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:42, 29 January 2018 (UTC).

Maps Wikipedia talk:Signatures

Signature size guidelines

The project page says:

Avoid markup such as <big> and ^{(or more)} tags (which enlarge text); this is likely to disrupt the way that surrounding text displays.

This is sloppy, because <big> increases display size by about (or exactly) 20%, and the use of "^{(or more)}" implies that, well, 180% would be OK, and I don't think this is the intent. We need to decide what is OK and then say on the project page whatever it is that we decide. Some points to consider:

I believe the criterion should be one of these three:
1. No font size increase is allowed for regular text.
2. Only minor font size increase is allowed (to be defined) for regular text.
3. Any font size increase is allowed as long as it doesn't affect surrounding text, e.g. by increasing line spacing. (This would allow <big>.)
Many user signatures wrap graphic characters such as ? and ? in <big>...</big> or other font-enlarging markup just to bring the graphic to the size of the text, for effects like this: Anomalocaris (?) and Anomalocaris (?). I believe this should be allowed.
Different skins have different default font sizes. In MonoBook, the default size is a little smaller than small, which corresponds to the old and deprecated <font-size="2">. In Vector, the default size is a littler larger than small. At least, these two statements are true on my Windows computer using Firefox.
My default signature: Anomalocaris (talk) ...
My signature, small: Anomalocaris (talk)
1em should be the same as default: Anomalocaris (talk)
My signature increased by 6%: Anomalocaris (talk)
The next full size up from small is medium, corresponding to the old and deprecated <font-size="3">: Anomalocaris (talk). This does not seem to increase line spacing.
The next full size up from medium is large, corresponding to the old and deprecated <font-size="4">: Anomalocaris (talk). This is large enough to increase line spacing.

I have been notifying users whose signatures have Obsolete HTML tags and other lint errors, encouraging them to change their signatures to be HTML5-compliant. I have avoided notifying users with font size issues, pending my writing of this posting and getting a response. Now that I've written it, will people please comment on whether they agree that the signature size guideline should be one of my three, and if so, which one they most agree with. If rule #2, please describe your proposed rule further, such as, don't increase your font size more than ____. --Anomalocaris (talk) 23:54, 18 January 2018 (UTC)

For the record, at least in my browser, Anomalocaris (?) and Anomalocaris (?) increse the line spacing, as do the 6% and <font-size="3"> examples. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 00:00, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Ahecht: Interesting. I use Windows 7, Mozilla Firefox, and MonoBook. May I ask what is your operating system, browser, and Wiki skin? --Anomalocaris (talk) 00:17, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

And I inserted "1em should be the same as default"; to get increase of 6% I used 1.06em; it would be noteworthy if 1em isn't the same as default. --Anomalocaris (talk) 01:30, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

At the time I was using IE11 (I know, I know, but it's mandated on my work computer) and vector, now I'm using Chrome on Windows 7 and Vector. I recreated your example in my sandbox and took a screenshot, and marked the distance between bullets using drawing software: File:Ahecht line spacing 18-Jan-2018.png. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 03:50, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ @Oshwah, Fixuture, Zzuuzz, PamD, Evolution and evolvability, Olidog, JamesLucas, Mr. Guye, Dan Harkless, David Biddulph, Rich Farmbrough, and Sonic678: Your comments are welcome here and also in #Excessive text shadow? and #line break at the beginning of a signature on this page. --Anomalocaris (talk) 20:34, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Signature font size, line spacing, text-wrapping, formatting, etc will mostly stay consistent because of HTML - but as mentioned above, people will see and report some differences that will be due to having different browsers, Operating Systems, Wikipedia scripts and skins, end-user screen resolutions, and so on... but I think those differences will be within a small margin. I believe that the signature policy currently states that colors, font, formatting, and size can be customized to the user's discretion, so long as it doesn't alter the spacing, margins, or anything else with text or page elements that surrounds the signature. I'm going to read through the discussion and all of the responses in-depth; I'm curious to know exactly what's prompting this discussion about signature sizes. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 21:21, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Oshwah: The world is moving to HTML5, and Wikipedia will have to move with it. HTML5 disallows four tags: , <tt>, <center>, and <strike>. There are a number of sloppy uses of HTML and Wiki markup that gave reasonable results in HTML4 and will give different results in HTML5. Wikipedians are working to clean things up throughout Wikipedia. One source of non-HTML5 compliance is user signatures. I have been working to notify users with non-HTML5-compliant signatures. In the process, I noticed many signatures that don't comply with WP:Signatures, but the guidelines on size are inconsistent. I don't want to ask anyone to make their signature HTML5 compliant and then come back later and ask them to make their signature size compliant, so I started this discussion to generate clarity, and when there is consensus and the project page is suitably updated, I will then notify users with signatures with size issues.

I think your comment means, "It is OK if a signature results in very slight increase in line spacing for some combinations of browsers, Operating Systems, Wikipedia scripts and skins, end-user screen resolutions, and so on ... as long as it's very slight." Is that a fair rephrasing of your opinion? --Anomalocaris (talk) 22:59, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Anomalocaris - Sure, you could say that. I'm okay with giving editors the freedom to customize their signatures (obviously to a point... lol). So long as the signature doesn't change or interfere with any of the text or elements that surround it (signatures that are sized too large would obviously do this), I don't see an issue with giving users some leeway with size, etc... If there's a specific situation or "fun" issue in the past that gives someone pause with my thoughts here, please let me know so I can take a look. ~Oshwah~^{(talk) (contribs)} 23:06, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

HTML5 doesn't "disallow" , <tt>, <center> or <strike>. It has marked them as obsolete along with a whole bunch of other elements. This says "Elements in the following list are entirely obsolete, and must not be used by authors", but that doesn't mean that browsers will stop supporting them. The likelihood is that browsers will continue to support them, with the same behaviour as documented for HTML 4.01 or even HTML 3.2, since there are a lot of legacy webpages out there which aren't going to be updated any time soon. We need not panic to eliminate these tags entirely; what we should be concerned about is sloppy use of these tags that in the past has been cleaned up by HTML Tidy, which as recently noted, will be removed from the MediaWiki software in the not too distant future. --Redrose64 ? (talk) 10:28, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

I don't mind seeing enlarged signatures unless they are so big that the readers' eyes are drawn straight to the signature rather than the actual discussion. This is the same for signatures with shadows. Olidog (talk) 19:05, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Bitcoin Cash Wiki Article Suffers From Edit Warring and Vandalism ...

src: news.bitcoin.com

Excessive text shadow?

I have seen some signatures with possibly excessive font shadow. Copying the markup into my signature, we have examples like these, which I have merged into other text to help evaluate the disruptiveness of the font shadow. Please offer your thoughts as to whether you find these font shadow examples disruptive. If you do find these examples disruptive, please suggest how you would modify the project page to explain not to do what these examples are doing. (Making your browser window narrow will help make the problem visible.)

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Anomalocaris : talk The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Anomalocaris (talk) The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. Anomalocaris^Talk The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. --Anomalocaris (talk) 09:21, 21 January 2018 (UTC)

I do find all of those examples distracting to the eye, which detracts from the reader's ability to understand discussions. It's signatures like that that feed the widespread sentiment to get rid of signature customization. But, despite that fact that WP:SIGAPP is a Wikipedia policy, its enforcement is almost a lost cause. I recently spent about 4 hours of my time, over two days, convincing one editor to change the colors in his sig, and he was a new editor. I long ago gave up trying the same thing with established editors. They like their flashy sigs and they won't change them short of a community outcry against them. One longtime editor has a confusing signature, I asked him on his UTP to change it, he refused, I suggested that he add "I know my signature is confusing and I don't care" near the top of his UTP, and he did so. That's the reality we have today, and until it changes I see little point in "improving" the guidance beyond what we have at WP:SIGAPP and WP:SIGPROB. -Mandruss ? 02:58, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Mandruss: I have asked over 500 users to update their signatures to remove images, obsolete HTML tags, and unescaped pipes and equals. One responded (in their deletion comment) with hostility; some are ignoring my message; most are complying. Even if some users are intentionally ignoring policy, I think most do and will comply, and we should set a reasonable guideline, because without a standard, users can reply, "I don't think my text shadow is distracting." My proposal: In the bullets under Your signature must not blink, scroll, or otherwise cause inconvenience to or annoy other editors, add one more bullet:

Do not use text shadow that spreads to lines above or below your signature.

Or perhaps some other words that say the same thing more elegantly. Perhaps numeric limits would be better, something like,

Do not use text shadow with a blur radius greater than 10px or 1.0em.

These numbers are based on very limited experiments; perhaps there should also be a limit on the absolute value of the vertical shadow. --Anomalocaris (talk) 09:32, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Good luck. I'm regularly advised that Wikipedia does not have firm rules and that community consensus is in what editors do, not what is written down. -Mandruss ? 19:33, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

When it comes to poor contrast or obscured text, that is an accessibility issue. --Redrose64 ? (talk) 22:04, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

Redrose64: Thank you for your observation. I was thinking about text shadow obscuring adjacent text; I wasn't thinking about text shadow obscuring the shadowed text by lack of contrast, but that can be an issue too, e.g. in my example Anomalocaris (talk) . This issue is already covered in the note on contrast ratio, so I don't think an additional guideline is needed, but again thank you for pointing it out. --Anomalocaris (talk) 08:49, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

I think Redrose64's point about accessibility applies to all use of text-shadow, not just those which are too large or the colors have bad contrast because using text-shadow is by definition is an attempt to draw the attention to one's signature and away from the text. That's why my .css file contains text-shadow: none !important; for all tags. Personally, I think banning the use of text-shadow in signatures altogether is the best way to go forward.There is plenty you can do to have an individual signature already without using such code. Regards SoWhy 10:48, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

Yes, indeed: contrast of the directly-shadowed text, and obscuring the adjacent text (to the sides, above and below). --Redrose64 ? (talk) 12:12, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

The other problem with text shadows is that many of them violate the contrast clause of WP:COLOR (which specifically applies everywhere, not just articles), and creates an accessibility issue. The first example you gave passes AA but not AAA, and the other two fail AA as well. --Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 14:29, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

In general I like it when things are memorable but not when they are distracting. That is a very fine line to tread, and perhaps why people are reluctant to enforce this policy. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:29, 29 January 2018 (UTC).

Agreed. Recognizing that people may find my signature annoying, I think simplicity wins and that minimal tweaking to allow us some individuality works best. In my case, I like the red, white and blue and the background is there so the white shows.--Georgia Army Vet Contribs Talk 15:18, 29 January 2018 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

line break at the beginning of a signature

The project page says:

Do not add line breaks ( ), which can also negatively affect nearby text display. The use of non-breaking spaces to ensure that the signature displays on one line is recommended.

There are a number of users who have   at the beginning of their signature. For talk page comments, this would seem to be OK, because they could have put the   in manually just before the four tildes or they could have put the four tildes on a new line. My question is, are there any signable templates that look bad if the signature starts with  ? --Anomalocaris (talk) 20:10, 25 January 2018 (UTC)

I'm not sure if there are examples of this causing a problem. All the best: Rich Farmbrough, 12:25, 29 January 2018 (UTC).

I've never seen a   "negatively affect nearby text display". I use it all the time as a whitespaceless paragraph break, such as here.
  works fine in {{atop}} parameter 1; I can't say for sure about other templates, but I'm somewhat obsessive about neatness and I think I would remember it if I had ever seen it cause even a minor display problem in a template. That said, I'm quite sure I haven't seen it in every template that might be used in a talk space.
I don't see much benefit in breaking before the sig, considering that surely upwards of 99.99% of editors don't, but that doesn't mean there should be guidance against it. Breaks within the sig would offend me even more, if anybody does that, but I would still oppose guidance against it.
As long as we have signature customization, some editors are going to have signatures that offend a large number of editors. If there were a proposal on the table today, I would probably support it despite liking my customized, community-friendly sig. In the end, we're here to build an encyclopedia, not engage in self-expression. -Mandruss ? 04:45, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Mandruss: My question isn't if a   "negatively affect nearby text display". Again, my question is "are there any signable templates that look bad if the signature starts with  ?" --Anomalocaris (talk) 21:59, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

Right, my best answer to the question is buried somewhere in there. Sorry for the rest. -Mandruss ? 23:31, 30 January 2018 (UTC)

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Here's a page where signatures should not begin with a line break: Wikipedia:Department of Fun/Word Association/Players. (The instructions say, "PLEASE INSERT A NUMBER SIGN, FOLLOWED BY THREE TILDES. Probably, some users signed with something other than three tildes, because there aren't a lot of talk links.) Are there other pages like this, where people are encouraged to just sign with three tildes as an entry in a numbered or bulleted list? On any such page, signatures should not begin with a line break. --Anomalocaris (talk) 22:17, 6 February 2018 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

Username must be copy/paste-able

Follow-up from Wikipedia:Village pump (technical)#Username should be c/p-able. --Redrose64 ? (talk) 20:50, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

We should get rid of this situation: the visible name does not match the actual name. (colors -- if you want to, but spelling changes are unacceptable). A bit like {{DISPLAYTITLE}}. -DePiep (talk) 20:48, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

I feel like I've seen this sort of proposal a few times before, but FWIW Support any proposal that improves correspondence between displayed signatures and usernames except where WP:NLS applies. -- Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:08, 17 April 2018 (UTC)
There is WP:SIGLINK already which helps somewhat. --Emir of Wikipedia (talk) 21:27, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

I would argue that it shouldn't be necessary to mouse-over a signature to determine the name of the user, and to click on it to copy the name before returning to discussion to paste it. The issue I've run into is when I'm looking for something a user said -- either in a given thread/page, or when unsure which page it was on via general search -- without digging through every one of their diffs in the histories of possible pages. This is sometimes important to understand past discussions and contextualize those in the present, not to mention when it comes to evading scrutiny for problematic behavior by rendering unusable (or at least difficult) on-page and wiki-wide searches. I find this most troubling when users introduce non-Latin characters where their username does not contain any (seemingly directly contrary to the spirit of WP:NLS), but I should say that a prohibition on just that has been proposed in the past (not by me) without success. -- Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 21:42, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

(ec) Must say, the top link (to WPT) is active too. Should not become forumshopping indeed. - DePiep (talk) 21:45, 17 April 2018 (UTC)

src: upload.wikimedia.org

bug?

Whenever I sign with four tildas, my comment gets the following text: - " Vince Calegon 11:52, 7 April 2018 (UTC) -- Preceding unsigned comment added by Vince Calegon (talk o contribs)" Is this a bug, or am I doing something wrong? Ironically, Vince Calegon 12:57, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

@Vince Calegon: Your signature is clearly not the default signature but instead is a custom signature, and it violates WP:SIGLINK since it contains no links at all. I suggest that you go to Preferences and turn off the option "Treat the above as wiki markup." --Redrose64 ? (talk) 20:59, 9 May 2018 (UTC)

OK, I've done that. Curious, though, that above is the first time it hasn't happened (after "ironically, "). I wrote ironically becuase I thought it would be apt whether or not the bug occurred, and it didn't?! Vince Calegon (talk) 08:22, 10 May 2018 (UTC)

Source of the article : Wikipedia

Sabtu, 19 Mei 2018