Help:How to/Use a Talk page

Every page on Otherkin Wiki has an associated Talk page. You can access it by pressing the 'Discussion' tab in the top left corner of any page.

What do I use Talk pages for?

You can think of Talk pages as forums or channels dedicated to their respective pages. For articles, people may use them to make suggestions for new sections, solicit feedback on how to format things, or dump sources that they've found. User Talk pages can be used to post messages to the user in question. Sometimes project pages will have specific information about what the talk page can be used for. For example, with the Article Workshop, we ask that you request articles to be added on the Talk page rather than directly adding them to the project page. Most pages have something on their Talk page, so you can always look to see what it's getting used for.

Generally speaking, we prefer that discussions are held on Talk pages rather than in the Discord as much as possible. This is so that important discussions don't get buried and decision making processes remain transparent and public.

How do I write something on a Talk page?

Otherkin Wiki uses the DiscussionTools extension to make Talk pages a little eaiser to use. This provides quick buttons to create topics and reply to comments, and also appends your signature to your comments for you. If you need to edit the page directly, see Doing it manually.

To create a new topic, press the 'Add topic' tab at the top right of the page. To respond to a comment under an existing topic, press the 'reply' button at the end of that comment. In both cases, it'll pop out a box where you can type and use basic markup like bold, italics, and links. If you're creating a new topic, please be sure to give it a title.

Doing it manually

Sometimes you may want or need to add a comment to a Talk page directly. Common use cases for this are devices where the extension doesn't work (like some mobile phones), or situations where the reply tool didn't detect someone's comment because it was formatted weird.

Creating a topic

Press 'Edit source' in the top right of the page. Topics are equivalent to sections in articles, so make your title a level 1 heading and write whatever you want to say underneath. Sign off with four tildes (~~~~) to insert your signature. Please remember to do this - asides from the obvious benefit of showing who made the comment and when, it's also what DiscussionTools looks for to add the 'reply' button for other people.

Responding to a comment

An 'edit source' button should appear next to each header/topic - press that and you'll get an editing window that focuses on just that section. Please add a colon (:) to the start of your message to indent it, so that it's clear that you're writing a response. If you're responding to another response, add two colons (::), so on and so forth. Again, remember to sign off!