Uncyclopedia:How pages work

In fact, their pages work quite differently.

Pages on a wiki have a structure and editors need to understand it.

A page is an article in the encyclopedia, a user page, or an talk page that we use to write messages to one another.

Every page on Uncyclopedia contains not only its appearance at the present time, but also information on how it has appeared at every point in the past. This is its Page History.

History tab

Did you know... that this has extreme privacy implications? If you confess on an Uncyclopedia page that you love to shag goats, then revert your edit, a Google search won't call it up, but any rube using the Page History will be able to see it forever.

If you are reading any page, you can gain access to the History by clicking the History tab at the top of the page. If you click it, you will see a table including every edit ever made to the page, and who made the edit. If someone who is not logged in to a registered account edits a page, their IP address is forever recorded in the history of the page. This is why Uncyclopedians often refer to unregistered editors as "IPs".

• If you click on a date in the list, Uncyclopedia will show you how the page looked at that time in the past.
• If you use the same line and click on "prev," Uncyclopedia will show you a "diff" report on what that edit changed, compared to the previous version.
• If you use the same line and click on "curr," Uncyclopedia will show you the same sort of "diff" report, but it will show all the changes since that edit and the current copy of the page.

There are also radio buttons. If you press the left-hand radio button of an older edit, and the right-hand radio button of a newer edit, then click on Compare selected revisions, then Uncyclopedia will show you a "diff" report on what changed between the two edits you specified. For example, this is a good way to sum up the edits made by a single editor.

Talk pages

Every page in the content namespaces has a talk page associated with it. This is where Uncyclopedians post messages to one another, discussing the content page, and especially how it might be made funnier. Every Uncyclopedian, including a user page, has a user talk page.

It is important to type any opinions you have on the content page on the talk page (and sign them!) and not blog about the content in-line in the content page itself.

Talk pages, and the orderly use of them, are discussed at Uncyclopedia:Talk pages.

Watchlist

Your watchlist is a list of Uncyclopedia pages you are likely to be interested in. At the top of each page is a link that says Watch (or Follow). Click on this and the article and the talk page both go on your watchlist. Click it again and they come off. In addition, editing a page puts it on your watchlist (unless you uncheck Follow this page).^[1]

You can see your watchlist by clicking My watchlist at the top of any page, or by calling for Special:Watchlist. This will show you, from the present time backward, the last change that was made to any page you are following; also, who made it, and what they typed as the Edit Summary.

This is "an encyclopedia that anyone can edit," and anyone can edit almost every page, including yours. Your watchlist is your only way to find out that one of your pages changed (unless you want to use Special:RecentChanges to view every edit anywhere, which will give you all the sadness of being an Admin without any of the power). There is one exception: If someone posts to your user talk page, Uncyclopedia will notify you at the top of every page you view until you read the post.

If you are a new Uncyclopedian, everyone can see what is on your watchlist by looking at the bottom of your user page. If this annoys you (and it should), disable this feature by clicking on My preferences at the top of any page.

A gadget that makes it easier to take pages off your watchlist is described in our advanced Hacks page.

Redirects

Redirects are pages that have no function except to guide the reader to a different page. A redirect has the following contents and none other:

#REDIRECT [[name of target page]]

If you call for a redirect, you get taken to the target page. If you use a redirect as a link in an article, any reader who clicks on it gets taken to the target page. The target page must not be another redirect! This is called a double redirect and all Admins are supposed to make them go away. If the target page gets deleted, the redirect will be a broken redirect. These should go away too, either by making them redirect to a better page or by deleting them.

Renaming (moving) pages

When you change the name of a page (move a page), the name of its talk page also moves. Another way to get a page's text to a new name is to copy the old text, create a page, and past the text into the new page. Don't do this. It neither brings the old talk page along, nor brings the old page's Page History. That means that no one can ever retrieve the text of a previous edit and we are all starting fresh with the page as it exists right now.

New Uncyclopedians do not have the power to move pages, but can request that someone else move the page by using UN:RFM. When you ask for a page to be moved, you must state the reason, and you should decide whether it is important to create a redirect. That is:

• Should uses of the page's old name still call up the page? or
• Should such uses return a response that there is nothing at this name?

If you are working on a page in your userspace, and use RFM to ask someone to move it to the main encyclopedia, you should say: Do not create a redirect, because no one will ever expect it to be in your userspace anymore.

If you have decided on a better name for a page in the encyclopedia, you should say: Do create a redirect, because people who type a name that isn't the best name should still get directed to the Uncyclopedia article for it.

Uncyclopedia's goal is not to correct misspellings. In addition, most articles are in the singular; if someone types the plural, the right answer is usually to make him type the singular. However, if someone asks for a page name using British English and the name of the page uses American English, or vice versa, the request should succeed. If someone correctly types a woman's maiden name, he should be given an Uncyclopedia page for her married name. These are valid reasons for an old name to redirect to a page with a new name.