Commons:Signatures

Shortcut: COM:SIGN

This page is about signing of posts on Commons. For copyright issues related to people's signature see COM:SIG.

This page is considered an official policy on Wikimedia Commons.

It has wide acceptance among editors and is considered a standard that everyone must follow. Except for minor edits (such as fixing typos, or bringing information up to date), please make use of the discussion page to propose changes to this policy.

Click the signature button in your edit toolbar to insert your signature at the end of your post.

Signing your posts on talk pages is required, and facilitates discussion by helping identify the author of a particular comment. Other users can then navigate to a talk page and address their comments to the specific, relevant user(s). Discussion is an important part of collaborative editing, because it helps all users to understand the progress and evolution of a work.

To sign and date a post, type four tilde characters (~~~~) or click the signature button in your edit toolbar at the end of your post. When the page is saved, these characters will be replaced with your username (with a link to your user page), a link to your user talk page, and a time stamp, like this:

Example (talk) 15:43, 4 September 2020 (UTC)

Rules on customized signatures

Wikimedia Commons allows users to customize their signatures in their preferences, but a few rules exist to avoid disruption. The signature must unambiguously identify the author of a comment and must link to the user page, the user talk page or the user's contributions. The customized signature should be designed in a way that does not impair the readability of the page. If nicknames are used, make sure they can be attributed to a specific user. Forging signatures or deliberately concealing one's own identity will not be accepted.

Transclusion of templates

Transclusions of templates and parser functions in signatures (like those which appear as {{User:Name/sig}}, for example) are forbidden. There are several reasons for this:

• Signature templates are vandalism targets, and will be forever, even if the user leaves the project.
• Certain automated scripts (bots) are used to automatically archive particularly active talk pages. These bots read the source of the talk page, but don't transclude templates, and so don't recognize the template as a signature.
• Signature templates are a small but unnecessary drain on the servers. Transcluded signatures require extra processing—whenever you change your signature source, all talk pages you have posted on must be re-cached.
• Substitution of templates in signatures is discouraged, as any such template will be redundant to using the same content as a raw signature.

Simple text signatures, which are stored along with the page content and use no more resources than the comments themselves, avoid these problems.

Images in signature

Images of any kind must not be used in signatures for the following reasons:

• they are an unnecessary drain on server resources, and could cause server slowdown
• a new image can be uploaded in place of the one you chose, making your signature a target for possible vandalism and Denial-of-service attacks
• they make pages more difficult to read and scan
• they make it more difficult to copy text from a page
• they are potentially distracting from the actual message
• images do not scale with the text, making lines with images higher than those without
• they clutter up the "file links" list on the image page every time you sign on a different talk page
• images in signatures give undue prominence to a given user's contribution

One possible alternative is to use unicode characters instead.

Signatures supporting multilingualism

It is recommended that active Commons users with usernames that do not use the Latin alphabet (for example, Arabic, Chinese, or Hebrew usernames) add a Latin transliteration, translation, or nickname to their signatures (via Preferences → section “Signature” → options Signature: and Treat signature as wikitext (without an automatic link)). This makes it easier for users not familiar with those scripts to recognise and interact with such users. Similarly, users with Latin alphabet usernames who regularly interact with users of another script (such as Japanese), are encouraged to add a version of their username in that script.

Example 1: ریلکه talk (Example)
Example 2: Example talk (ریلکه/里尔克/リルケ)

Usernames in right-to-left scripts

In signatures of users with usernames in Arabic, Hebrew or other right-to-left scripts, the presence of text in both directionalities causes problems in some browsers. An example of such a signature is

End of comment مثال (talk) 0:00, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

which for some may display like "1 ,0:00 (talk) مثال January 2014 (UTC)" (see Bi-directional text:Unicode support).

This can be resolved by adding a left-to-right mark or LRM (‎) after the link to the user's page:

[[User:مثال|مثال]]&lrm; ([[User talk:مثال|<span class="signature-talk">talk</span>]]) 0:00, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

→ مثال‎ (talk) 0:00, 1 January 2014 (UTC)

In the "Signature" section of your preferences, you can change your signature to include a left-right mark. If your comment itself is in a right-to-left script, it may be necessary to precede your signature with another LRM (otherwise part of the signature will be displayed before the comment).