Training modules/dashboard/slides/12609-wikidata-communication-tools
Communication tools
editHow do you communicate with other editors? These slides will introduce you to some common ways to reach out to other editors.
User discussion pages Just like items and properties, your user page has an associated discussion page where other editors can leave you messages. You will see a link to it, labeled "Discussion" in the top of each page. You can also access your talk page by clicking on this link. You can also leave messages for other editors by posting on their talk page.
This image shows a few important details. First this is a draft of a message on Will's discussion page. It has not been published yet. The way the message will look is below the Preview section. It starts with "Wikidata Training," the subject for this message. Below you can see the message in the editing area.
You may notice some characters that look like code. This is wikicode, which is a markup language that Wikimedia projects use. For this course you will not need to learn wikicode except when using discussion pages. The first bit of wikicode is there to ping Ian. The formula to ping another user is: {{ping|USERNAME}} where "ping" is the action to reach out to someone and after the pipe "|" you would add their username. Pinging someone causes a notification to appear in their notices in the upper right corner of the screen.
The last bit of wikicode is a signature. Always sign your posts with ~~~~ and it will be transformed into your signature and a date stamp automatically.
Other types of discussion pages
When you engage in a discussion on a WikiProject, you will generally use the talk page. When you engage in Project chat or a similar page, you will use the main project page, not the talk page.
Editors will assume that you will read messages left on your user talk page, and that you will check back to see if they replied to posts that you left on their talk page, on WikiProjects, or in other places like Project chat. You can do this by adding their page to your watchlist (as explained on the next slide).