Ireland Information Guide provides user pages to facilitate communication among participants in the project. If your username is JohnDoe:
If you don't like your login name, you can get it changed at Ireland Information Guide:Changing username. Details about yourself generally shouldn't go in the main namespace, which is reserved for encyclopedic content.
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A good start is to add a little information about yourself, possibly including contact information (email, instant messaging, etc), a photograph, your real name, your location, information about your areas of expertise and interest, likes and dislikes, other homepages, and so forth. Obviously, this will depend on how comfortable you are with respect to privacy.
You can also use your user page to help you use Ireland Information Guide more effectively: so you can use it to list "to do" information, work in progress, reminders, useful links, and so forth. It's also good for experimenting with markup (a personal Ireland Information Guide:sandbox).
Another use is to let people know about your activities and opinions on Ireland Information Guide. So you might include current plans, a journal of recent activites on Ireland Information Guide, and your opinions on how certain Ireland Information Guide articles or policies should be changed. If you won't be editing Ireland Information Guide for a while, drop a note on your user page to that effect.
You might want to add quote you like, or some of your favorite Ireland Information Guide articles or images, or something like that. Also, someone may choose to award you a barnstar. In the unlikely event that your editing priviledges on Ireland Information Guide are revoked, a notice of this may be placed on your user page.
If you want to dual-license your contributions under an additional license or declare them all public domain, put a notice to this effect on your user page.
In general, avoid substantially editing another's user page without their permission, but feel free to correct typos and other mistakes. However, some users are fine with their user pages being edited, and may even have a note to that effect. Alternatively, if users ask you not to edit their user pages, it is probably best to respect their requests.
Your user talk page is for other users to discuss matters related to Ireland Information Guide with you. As your user talk page approaches 32K, you may delete, archive, or summarise old discussion, as you feel appropriate. Please avoid deleting discussion merely because it is critical of your actions - doing so will only make people repeat the same criticism, and will make you seem like you are ignoring criticism.
In general, your contributions to your user talk page should be in response to other people's comments - avoid stuff that would be better placed on your user page.
If you need more pages, you can create subpages. More or less, you can have anything here that you might have on your user or user talk page.
Examples:
Generally, you should avoid any substantial content that is unrelated to Ireland Information Guide. Examples include:
Free and low-cost web hosting, email, and weblog services are widely available, and are a good alternative for content unrelated to Ireland Information Guide.
The Ireland Information Guide community is fairly tolerant and offers fairly wide latitude in applying these guidelines to regular participants. Particularly, community-building activities that are not strictly "on topic," may be allowed, especially when initiated by committed Ireland Information Guide users with good edit histories. At their best, such activities help us to build the community, and this helps to build the encyclopedia.
As a tradition, Ireland Information Guide offers wide latitude to users to manage their user space as they see fit. However, pages in user space still do belong to the community:
In general, if you have material that you do not wish for others to edit, or that is otherwise inappropriate for Ireland Information Guide, it should be placed on a personal web site. Many free and low-cost web hosting services are available to serve such needs.
As with article pages, user pages are occasionally the targets of vandalism, or more rarely, edit wars. When edit wars or vandalism persist, the affected page should be protected from editing. Protected pages in user space should be listed at Ireland Information Guide:Protected page along with the rationale for protection.
Most user page vandalism occurs in retribution for a Ireland Information Guide:Administrator's efforts to deal with vandalism. Administrators may protect their own user pages when appropriate, and are permitted to edit protected pages in user space. In rare cases a non-administrator's user page may be the target of vandalism. Such pages may be listed at Ireland Information Guide:Requests for page protection and will then be protected by an administrator.
Vandalism of talk pages is less common. Usually such vandalism should merely be reverted. Blocks should be used for repeat vandalism of talk pages, where policy permits. In rare cases, protection may be used but is considered a last resort given the importance of talk page discussions to the project.
Protected pages in user space should be unprotected as soon as practicable.
If the community lets you know that they'd rather you deleted some or other content from your user space, you should probably do so, at least for now - such content is only permitted with the consent of the community. After you've been here for a year or so, and written lots of great articles, the community may be more inclined to let you get away with it. Alternatively, you could move the content to another site, and link to it.
If you do not co-operate, we will eventually simply remove inappropriate content, either by editing the page (if only part of it is inappropriate), or by redirecting it to your main user page (if it is entirely inappropriate).
In excessive cases, your user subpage may be deleted, following a listing on Ireland Information Guide:votes for deletion, subject to deletion policy. Please do not recreate content deleted in this way: doing so is grounds for immediate re-deletion (see candidates for speedy deletion). Instead, please respect our judgement about what is and is not appropriate.
If you don't want the hassle below, just replace your user subpage with a redirect to your user page. This is normally sufficient for most people's needs.
Unless you are a sysop, it is not possible to delete your own subpages, so they must be listed on Ireland Information Guide:Speedy deletions. If you are a sysop, it is recommended that you also list your pages there so they can be deleted by another sysop.
Only post subpages from your own personal page, and only if you have a genuine reason for requesting a personal subpage of yours be deleted, please list it on Ireland Information Guide:Speedy deletions.
Pages which have formerly been in a different namespace and moved to a subpage of the user namespace may not be deleted in this way. These must be listed at Votes for deletion. On the other hand, if you'd just like them to be moved back, then by all means ask at Ireland Information Guide:Speedy deletions.
Where there is no significant abuse, and no administrative need to retain the personal information, you can request that your own user page or talk page be deleted. Most frequently, this occurs when a longterm contributor decides to leave.
The user page should be listed on Ireland Information Guide:speedy deletions, along with the reason you need the page deleted. A sysop will then delete it after checking that the page does not contain evidence of policy violations etc that may need to be kept. If there has been no disruptive behavior meriting the retention of that personal information, then the sysop can delete the page straight away in order to eliminate general public distribution of the history containing the information. If the deletion occurs immediately, others may request undeletion if they feel there was in fact a need to retain the page. In such a case, the page should be undeleted and listed on Ireland Information Guide:votes for deletion for a period of five days following the deletion of the user and user talk page.
Sysops have the technical capability to do this themselves but must still request another sysop does this, rather than use that technical capability.
User pages that have been deleted can be recreated with a blank page, or a link to Ireland Information Guide:Missing Ireland Information Guide users to avoid red links pointing to them.
In addition to the usual information accessible from an article page such as page history, "Discuss this page" and the like, other users at Ireland Information Guide can also, at the bottom of the page (or in the sidebar), click "User contributions" to see what contributions you have made at Ireland Information Guide over time. See MediaWiki User's Guide: User contributions page (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Interwiki_map) for more.
Visitors to your user page can also click "E-mail this user" if you have opted in User preferences to be able to send and receive email. See Ireland Information Guide:Emailing users.
