Multiversal Omnipedia:Customization

Customisation allows users to tailor Wikipedia to suit their own preferred style. It mostly allows for changes in the way pages are displayed, but there are also many functional tweaks that some editors find useful when editing articles.

The preferences link, available on the menu of a logged-in user, allows you to change most of the options that you will require.

User name and signatures

Your username is displayed in the edit histories of all the articles you contribute to and is linked to your user and talk pages. You choose your name when you first register on Wikipedia and it is usual to stay with the same name throughout your time on the project.

Signatures are customised using the preferences under "User data" where they are referred to as your "Nickname". You should always sign your posts on talk pages and many users choose to customise the way their signature appears.

You can use any wikitext as your nickname. If "Raw signatures (without automatic link)" is unchecked, the software enters "[[User:Name|" in front of, and "]]" after your nickname wikitext.

Adding a link to your talk page

Perhaps the most common signature choice is to add a link to your talk page. "]] | [[User talk:Name|Talk" as your signature will also include a link to your talk page.

Also you can add a separator, so that the signature looks something like this: "Name | Talk".

More complicated options

You can also check the 'raw signatures' box: in that case you specify the full wikitext to be used between the two dashes and the timestamp. This gives more versatility, and in cases like above the code is less cryptic.

You can also include font tags, images, and templates. Note that changes in the images and templates are retroactive, which on one hand may be confusing, but on the other hand, to rectify annoying signatures, may be convenient. To avoid retroactivity, use a new image or template name. Do not create a signature template in the article or template namespace: instead use a subpage of your own userpage such as sig, and link it with "{{User:Name/sig}}". Using a template like this, however, is not recommended, as it increases the transclusion overhead for talk pages.

Skins

A MediaWiki skin is a style of page display. There are differences in the HTML code the system produces (but probably not in the page body), and also different style sheets are used.

The default is the MonoBook skin.