Wikipedia:Global user page

Since February 2015, users with an account can create a global user page for all Wikimedia projects on Meta-Wiki.

Implementation
The user page on Meta is displayed on all Wikis where no local user page exists.


 * At the moment all templates are evaluated at Meta, but wikilinks link to the local project where the user page is displayed. It is currently not possible to display different content for individual projects, however, it is possible to account for the language of the reader.
 * With  (Meta only) and   (everywhere else), different content can be displayed; see Transclusion for details.
 * For optimal use of the Babel system in other wikis, the parser function  should be used. In contrast to Template:Babel that differs on every wiki, this approach is guaranted to work on all sites.
 * Changes on Meta are immediately visible everywhere.

A possibly still-existing soft redirect (with Template:Soft redirect) needs to be deleted from the local page for the global page to become operative. Redirects to the global user page have to be replaced in the local wiki (English Wikipedia) with soft redirects or wikilinks, as they otherwise would end up at Special:BrokenRedirects.

Delivery wiki of the user page
Currently (start of 2016), the user page is evaluated at Meta. After a changed version has been computed and Meta templates and system messages have been interpreted, the content is frozen for delivery to other wikis. The completed page is displayed as a shadow page where no local page exists.

There are intentions to change the software to interpret the page in the local wiki and use local templates.

Wikilinks on the other hand always link to the local wiki. To link to a specific wiki a full interwiki link has to be provided:


 * points to a Wikipedia  in english   configuration and the named local user page.

For the concept of shadow pages, see Requests for comment/Shadow namespaces.

Transition of existing pages
To see where local user pages already exist, the tool meta/userpages/ can be used. Also helpful are the tools guc/ and meta/crossactivity.

Users with many local user pages can ask Synchbot to delete these pages.

CSS and JavaScript
Preferences for Shared CSS/JavaScript links to m:Special:MyPage/global.js and m:Special:MyPage/global.css.

Example: account for reader's language
While it is not possible to display the page in the project language, it is possible to show the page in the reader's chosen user interface language. To do this, the following code can be used on the global user page:

At the moment, User page is a multilingual template at meta: meta:Template:Userpage. In the future, it could be required to check for the existence of a local template before transcluding it.