Wikipedia:Don't use a billboard signature: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 20:32, 16 September 2018

Revision as of 18:22, 17 September 2018

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{{nutshell|Discussion pages are about discussion. Do not highlight your signature to draw attention away from discussion to focus on your name.}}

It is standard practice on Wikipedia to sign talk page comments, adding information about who wrote it and when it was written. Registered users can customize their signatures through their preferences, affecting how their signatures appear to other users. Some users change their signatures for functional reasons, and others customize it for stylistic reasons, as a means of expression. Signatures should not, however, distract from the discussion itself. A signature is not a [[billboard]] to draw everyone's attention to the styling of your username. Using a big, bright signature can be viewed as annoying when a single user's name becomes the most prominent part of what should be a community discussion. Some elements, like color, and especially text highlighting, can also affect some people's concentration and ability to focus on the important part of the discussion (i.e. everything other than the style of your signature).

A signature should not, however, distract from the discussion itself. When you use text highlighting or other CSS to turn your username into a [[billboard]], you pull editors' concentration away from the substance of the talk page to instead focus on your name. A better place to use extensive highlighting, colors, and other styles is on your userpage to which your signature links, not every instance of your signature.

==What the guideline says==

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The guideline says to avoid enlarging the text, adding line breaks or horizontal rules, to use subscribe and superscript sparingly, to ensure it's big enough to read, and to use color sparingly.

One reason to use color sparingly is for accessibility reasons. Using different colors in your signature can affect some people's ability to read it if the contrast between the text and background is not sufficiently high.

Using a billboard signature inconveniences and annoys other editors, but is not directly related to accessibility, and the guideline does not specifically address text highlighting.

==Avoid text highlighting==