Help talk:Signatures

Signatures on GeoGebraWiki identify you as a user and your contributions to GeoGebraWiki. They encourage civility in discussions by identifying the author of a particular comment and the date and time at which it was made. Because of that, having an uncivil signature is strongly discouraged (in some cases, to the point of blocking the user until it is changed). In general anything that is not allowed in a user name should not be used in a signature either.

When signatures should and should not be used

Any posts made to the user talk pages, article talk pages and any other discussion pages should be signed. Edits to articles should not be signed, as signatures on Wikipedia are not intended to indicate ownership or authorship of any article. Rather, the page history takes care of the need to identify edits with users. Therefore, signatures should not be used in edit summaries, as they do not translate from ~~~~. In other instances, when posts should not be signed, specific instructions are provided to contributors.

How to sign your posts

Preferred option

Using four tildes

There are two ways to sign your posts:

1. At the end of your comments simply type four tildes (~), like this: ~~~~.
2. If you are using the toolbar option (it usually appears above the edit screen as a default),<ref>If the browser's settings don't allow JavaScript, the icons appear only if the settings are changed. If the browser is set not to show pictures, the icon can be found on "Your signature with timestamp"</ref> click the signature icon: File:Button sig new.png, to add the four tildes.

Your signature will appear after you have saved the changes. The end result is the same in both cases.

Typing four tildes will result in the following:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~~	[[User:Administrator|Administrator]] ([[User talk:Administrator|talk]]) 04:06, 24 April 2024 (UTC)	Example (talk) 04:06, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

Since typing four tildes adds the time and date to your resulting signature, this is the preferred option for signing your posts in discussions.

Other options

Using three tildes

Typing three tildes results in the following:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~	[[User:Administrator|Administrator]] ([[User talk:Administrator|talk]])	Administrator (talk)

However, since this does not date-stamp your signature, you may wish to sign this way only when leaving general notices on your user page or user talk page. This is also a convenient shortcut (rather than typing out the full code) when you want to provide a link to your user page.

Using five tildes

Typing five tildes will convert to a date stamp with the current date and time, without adding your signature, like this:

Wikimarkup	Resulting code	Resulting display
~~~~~	04:06, 24 April 2024 (UTC)	04:06, 24 April 2024 (UTC)

In general, when communicating with others, you should use one of the previous options, and not only a timestamp.