User talk:Cntlsn

Greetings
I saw your questions about userpages etc at Phabricator T21715. You may have already learned more about how we work, but here's some info in case it helps:

All pages are collectively owned by the community. Article pages are considered the public face of the encyclopedia. All of the other pages are a "behind the scenes" workplace, like the inside of a factory. They are semi-public, meaning that all pages are public-accessible but that non-article pages are almost never viewed by non-editors. Most of our behind-the-scenes pages are NoIndexed so they don't appear on search engines, and (except for the article_talk link on each article) you will almost never find a public-facing link leading directly to any of our behind the scenes work pages.

Many people show up thinking Wikipedia is similar to socialmedia sites like Facebook, where you control or "own" your pages or content. Wikipedia isn't like that at all. All contributions are under an open copyright licence. All pages and all content are collectively "owned" by the community. (Notice that I can edit your user page, and you can edit mine. However it is generally inappropriate to edit someone else's userpage unless there is a good/constructive reason.) All pages exist to serve the mission of building the encyclopedia, and encyclopedia content is collectively managed for the benefit of the public.

As mentioned at Phabricator, sometimes companies (or self-promotional individuals) show up wanting to create their own Facebook-style page for themselves. They often use the company's name as the username. If they create a promotional page in article-space, we either delete it or make it neutral (we would remove any promotional aspects and we add any appropriate unfavorable information). Sometimes someone tries to create that article on their userpage. That is not allowed - we are not going to maintain an article on a userpage and we don't want anyone confusing a userpage for an actual encyclopedia article. If the content on the userpage would acceptable as a new article then we can page-move it to mainspace where it will be reviewed and maintained as a proper article. If an "article" on a userpage is not usable then we would blank the content as a confusing misuse of the page.

You can visit the Teahouse if you have any questions, or contact me on my user_talk page. (You'll get quicker response at Teahouse, whereas I'm uncommonly familiar with Phab and other Foundation related things.) You're invited to Boldly continue editing if you're interested. Tip: There's overwhelming agreement among the editing community that the wikitext editor is the better tool for the job for any real work. I'll post a generic Welcome template below, for assorted useful links. Alsee (talk) 23:46, 2 April 2019 (UTC)

Welcome!
Hello, Cntlsn, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful:


 * Introduction and Getting started
 * Contributing to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

You may also want to complete the Wikipedia Adventure, an interactive tour that will help you learn the basics of editing Wikipedia. You can visit the Teahouse to ask questions or seek help.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or, and a volunteer should respond shortly. Again, welcome!