Help:Talk pages/Anonymous talk pages proposal

There have been questions raised on occasion at the Village Pump and elsewhere about what can be edited or removed from the User Talk pages of anonymous users (e.g. pages like User talk:192.168.0.1).

As these User Talk pages are often used to inform or warn anonymous users about potentially problematic behaviour, preserving these warnings is extremely useful to admins who may be considering imposing a temporary block or other measure. As anonymous IP addresses may be shared, the users who contribute through them also enjoy even weaker 'ownership' privileges than logged in users over their User Talk space.

I therefore propose that the following section be added to Talk page, which will require non-vandalism messages to be preserved for a period of at least X days (where X is to be decided by discussion here&mdash;I'm inclined to suggest 7 days as a reasonable compromise.) Please direct suggested changes and comments to the talk page.

Anonymous user talk pages
Talk pages are an essential tool for communicating with anonymous contributors and helping them to adapt to and interact with the Wikipedia community. Consequently, comments added to the Talk pages of anonymous editors should not be removed for a period of at least X days.

There are two major exceptions to this rule. Comments on anonymous user Talk pages may be removed if the comment is vandalism or a personal attack. Warnings about vandalism or reminders to follow Wikipedia policy should not be removed.

Amendment to anonymous talk page notice
The existing default notice for the anonymous user talk pages at MediaWiki:Anontalkpagetext would also be amended under this proposal.

Amended wording
''This is the discussion page for an anonymous user who has not created an account yet or who does not use it. We therefore have to use the numerical IP address to identify him/her. Such an IP address can be shared by several users. If you are an anonymous user and feel that irrelevant comments have been directed at you, please create an account or log in to avoid future confusion with other anonymous users. Please do not remove comments that are less than X days old unless they are personal attacks or vandalism.''