Help:Username

Your USApedia Username is the name that identifies you and your edits within USApedia. Once established, it cannot be changed so we encourage you to create your username the way you'd like people to see your name.

We encourage a basic format of Firstname.Lastname so you can easily remember your username and it also helps make you more findable in the wiki. Common strategies for picking a username:

1. Pick the same username that you use to login to your computer in the morning
2. Your formal first name and last name
3. First name and last name as you like to be called.
   • e.g. your formal name is Robert Smith but you prefer Bob so you pick the username Bob.Smith
4. A creative username that reflects who you are.
   • Obviously, "creative" names need to be clean, professional and respectful.
   • do not create usernames that reflect a group or generic login. (e.g. DHS team)

All of your edits and activities on USApedia are tied to your username.

To see who has made change to a wiki page, simply click the History tab and compare prior versions. See Help:Article history for more information on article histories. A list of all changes to all pages to USApedia can be viewed by clicking Recent changes on the navigation bar at the left.

Creating Your User Page

Main page: Help:User Page Creation

Once you create an account, USApedia reserves a special page for you that is called "Your User Page". Your userpage is always just one click away by clicking your username in the top right corner of the USApedia window. Your user page is a powerful tool to aid you in managing your efforts within USApedia and in sharing information about yourself that you'd like everyone to know. (Remember, no Personally Identifiable Information!)

Create your User Page is easy. Go directly to your User Page or click your username at the top of the page. At a minimum, we encourage you to add your name, phone, email, etc. We also encourage you to add a section called "Pages I'm interested in" and add wiki links to that section to pages that most interest you or that you work on.

All userpages are kept in the "User" Namespace. What this means is the all username pages are preceded by "User:<username>". Examples:

• User:Tom

Forgotten Username or Password

Determining Your Username

The primary authentication mechanism for USApedia is your username. It is case and syntax sensitive. Most of the time your browser will store your username in the username field but we encourage you to write down your username so you can refer back to it.

If you forget it, please check your email for emails with the text "USApedia."

Resetting your Password

USApedia login form	Reset password screen
File:USApedia login form.png	File:Reset password.png

To reset your password,

1. Go to the Login page
2. Click on "Forgot your password?"
3. Enter your username in the username field
4. Enter your email address in the email address field
5. Select the blue “Reset password” button
6. Look in your email with your temporary password
   • From: "USApedia"
   • Title: "Account details on USApedia"

File:Password reset email.png

Password reset email

Creating a redirect to your username

Redirects are powerful tools for connecting information together within the wiki. It is possible to create a redirect that will point people to your user page in the user namespace. For instance, if you type Tom in the search window, USApedia will Redirect you to User:Tom. To create a redirect like this, simply type your name in the search window. If the page does not yet exist, you can create it by clicking on the red link.

Visual editor

_{Edit at Help:Visual editor#Redirect}

You can make this page into a redirect, a page which will automatically take readers to another page on this wiki. This is useful for mis-spellings and alternative names or concepts. If you do so, readers will not see the contents of this page.

You can make a page a redirect to another page by checking the "Redirect this page to" checkbox, and then typing the name of the page to which you want to send the reader who tries to go to the page that you're editing.

File:VisualEditor Page Settings Redirects-en.png

At the bottom is the option to prevent page renames from updating this redirect. This is very rarely used. You can prevent this redirect from being updated automatically when the page to which it redirects is moved, in the very rare case that this is needed.

Enhanced editor

Main page: Enhanced editor

Put the redirect wikitext into the page using two methods

1. Using redirect icon (File:USApedia advanced toolbar redirect icon.png) on the Advanced Tools portion of the Editing toolbar
2. The modifying the wikitext for Tom
   1. #Redirect [[User:Tom]].

Existing page

If a page already exists that matches your name, say if there are two or more "Jane Smith"s, you then need to decide what steps to take next, which could include:

1. Converting the page from a redirect into a "Disambiguation" page. This allows you to point to multiple meanings of the term. The St. John page is an example of a Disambiguation page. See Template:Disambig for more information.
2. Leaving it as is.

See Also

• Generic USApedia username

External links

Wikipedia's Username policy