Wikipedia:User page design guide/Introduction

Welcome to the user page design center. Here you will find resources for developing your user page. Enjoy!

If you are an absolute beginner, (not a beginner)^{[clarification needed]} you might consider using the standard article format for your userpage. That should suffice while you're learning the ropes. If you don't have a user page yet and don't know how to create a page, then click on your user name at the top of the screen and follow the instructions (if the page already exists, your username will be blue instead of red). If you don't have a user account, then click on "log in" at the top of the page, and then click on "Create an account" and fill in the boxes. Write your password down somewhere in case you forget it, and whatever you do, don't forget where you put your password!

Eventually, active Wikipedians turn their attention to their user pages. Creating a nice user page can be a daunting and time consuming task. One can spend countless hours searching the User and Wikipedia namespaces for ideas on what to include and design features to add, and even longer trying to figure out how to put them all together. Many resources and examples have been gathered and presented here to save users time which they can in turn apply to improving the encyclopedia. Simply cut and paste the wikicode of the design elements you wish to use on your userpage; and then modify them if you like, to create your own personal style. Browse the User Page Hall of Fame as examples of what others have done with their pages.

User pages

User pages serve several special purposes on Wikipedia. First, they are tools which provide areas for personal sandboxes, workshops, and page storage, to experiment and build pages before placing them in article namespace, and to store tools and pages the user finds particularly useful. User pages are perfect for building and storing reading lists, Wikipedia bookmarks, and navigation bars, to assist your Wikipedia-based research, study, and navigation. Your user page also provides a place to express yourself, and any practice you get designing your user page may be applicable as skills upon making the encyclopedia itself better. Each user page has a discussion page, which makes it easy to communicate with each editor directly; Wikipedia even notifies you when you receive a new message. User pages also provide a place for programs or projects not suitable for other namespaces. A Wikipedian's user page can tell us a lot about him or her; their record of contributions to Wikipedia, their wikiphilosophy, their strengths and interests, etc; and gives us a place to put userboxes! The userbox system, which is integrated into Wikipedia's category system, automatically enters the user who uses one into the category that userbox represents, and serves as a directory of Wikipedians for finding users who have an appropriate skill or knowledge-level that you need applied when you yourself do not have it. Programmers, for instance are listed by skill-level. See Category:Wikipedians.

K.S. Ernst ([ksernst.com])has been writing poetry, making art, and creating visual poetry works for over 40 years. [1] Some of the most interesting implications, of K.S. Ernst’s artwork are how it reads as Creative Non-Fiction, and Visual Poetry/Visual Fiction. When the story of Creative Non-Fiction and Visual Poetry is told in the United States, works by K.S. Ernst are imperative to that telling. Poetry Magazine ([www.poetrymagazine.org]), published by the Poetry Foundation in Chicago, will feature Visual Poetry in its November issue. When published, K.S. Ernst’s art will be on newsstands nationwide. For now, Ernst calls herself a “visio-textual artist,” who hopes that really great art is not judged by the neatness of the category in which it fits. (Interview, Amy Hufnagel)

Born in St Louis, MO, USA (1946- ), she is the daughter of a mother visual artist/furniture builder and father who was a Professor of Psychology with an expertise in auditory and cutaneous communications Please review at [2]. She has two sisters. Her parent’s academic work took Ernst from St. Louis, MO, to Charlottesville, VA, to Princeton, NJ, at each place’s best institution. She spent her first year of college at Smith College and then married Ernie Ernst, a successful manufacturer, collector, jazz musician, and nature lover. K.S. Ernst graduated from Monmouth University and has spent her adult life living in New Jersey.

While Ernst is best known as one of the most important examples of late twentieth-century/early twenty-first century female visual poets in America, she is also known in the digital arts and fine arts communities. Ernst’s work is applicable to the genres of sculpture, multimedia, works on paper, and new digital works. Her work has critical applicability to art historical discussions regarding late twentieth-century use of image and text, or perhaps more succinctly the “text as image” trend as seen in important contemporary artists like Xu Bing.

Ernst’s art is the logical manifestation of text in verbal and visual art forms in American Modernism; the trend of using text in art continues through the didactic identity and political work of the 1980s and 90s. But Ernst is a counterpoint to say Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer; Ernst is more along the lines of Carrie Mae Weems’s poetics and folkloric pieces, or parallel to Richard Kostelanetz’s abstract text constructs. She also employs impressive Fluxist characteristics in her book arts and performance art, as seen in her work with the Be Blank Consort,and here another rooting in fine art traditions is applied to K.S. Ernst’s use of text. In short, K.S. Ernst makes artwork that is the analysis/play of the concept “text as image;” and this study has a tradition in art history. Visual poetry is a genre of visual expression, as well as a category of poetic study. It is born from the act of writing poetry, but slips between discipline areas because the practice uses the language of visual art to “write.” Often the text becomes symbolic and iconic representation; one writes/experiments with letters, words, images, and space.

As an artist, Ernst moves from sculpture to computer technologies employing a variety of manual/sculptural and technological methodologies in her work. Ernst began using computer technologies in her work in the 80s and the computer has factored as a major tool in her creative process and output; this timeframe, in computer art history, places her at the forefront of digital file making.

Writes critic Karl Young, “Her earliest visual poetry, from the late 1960s, began with spatial exploration of text, primarily playing on negative space in relation to constellations and clusters of letters ... usually relating to the sensuality of stroke segments and junctures.” Her current work uses digital printing on silk, organza, and denim in multi-layered visual texts with painting and fiber manipulation. Ernst writes, “I have ventured into visual, rather than rhythmic, aspects of a poem.” And, “I make poems in forms other than books” so that one can not “shut the book on my storytelling.”

Texts like The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 by Willard Bohn and the “monstrous anthologies like those of Solt and Williams” cite that those “who have continued the art (of visual poetics) have become more dedicated and have greatly expanded the medium, keeping it one of the most vital and inventive directions in contemporary poetry” says Karl Young of Kaldron On-Line in1998 ([3]). K.S. Ernst is a primary, critical example of a woman artist coming of age in this vibrant poetic expression, and remaining committed to artistic practice for years. She is one of the best examples of late twentieth century/early twenty first century female visual poets in America. (The genre of visual poetry can be easily researched [4]; here one will find a great starting point if the genre of visual poetry - and relating concrete poetry - is to be considered.)

“Cheat Sheet Chronology” In the 1970s K.S. Ernst began to make workbooks of pieces she thought up (now numbering over 1000), and then began building pieces. She made truly fascinating and playful sculptural word constructions. In the 1980s Ernst made work, exhibited, read, and used the computer. In the 1990s the same work continued; plus, she created a working archive of her entire collection, housed Ohio State University Libraries, Rare Books and Manuscripts Avant Writing Collection In 2000 Ernst continued to learn new soft- and hard-ware and experiment with different artistic processes. She formalized her practice of collaborating with other poets as a “production and inspiration model.” Institutions and collectors are acquiring her work, and she continues to remain committed to art making and thinking.

K.S. Ernst creatively and fiscally manages Press Me Close where she published visual poetry postcards and T-shirts [Add: “in the 1980s.”] Her work has been published extensively in books and magazines. She has shown her work nationally and internationally for years, and is included in many important art collections. Ernst has also participated in artist residencies, lectures, and performances. Below is a list of these resources.

Quote from K.S. Ernst "I am interested in words and letters as symbols — their basic symbolic makeup as well as their representational use. Thus it is words and letters that form a common thread throughout my work. I work in a variety of media including collage, fiber, painting, sculpture, assemblage, and installations."

Wikipedia:User page design guide/Introduction

User pages

See also