If you'd like to learn more about working with the nuts and bolts of Memory Alpha, I have a few links that you might want to check out:

• Our policies and guidelines provides links to inform you on what is appropriate for Memory Alpha and what is not. Particular items of note are the canon policy, the editing guidelines, our point of view, copyrights and guidelines for proper etiquette.
• How to edit a page includes a basic tutorial about how to use our special wikitext code here on Memory Alpha.
• Naming conventions provides guidelines on how to name a new page that you may want to create.
• The Manual of Style is an overview of the basic guidelines for how to format and style your articles.
• How to write a great article is a list of suggestions that can help you put together an article that might end up on our Featured Articles list someday.
• See the user projects page for current projects of our archivists, or help us to reduce the number of stubs.
• Look up past changes you have made in your contributions log.
• Keep track of your favorite Memory Alpha articles through your very own watchlist.
• Create your own user page and be contacted on this page, your talk page.

One other suggestion: if you're going to make comments on talk pages or make other sorts of comments, please be sure to sign them with four tildes (~~~~) to paste in your user name and the date/time of the comment.

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in our Ten Forward community page. Thanks, and once again, welcome to Memory Alpha!--Alan 02:42, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Editing user pagesEdit

Please do not edit user pages for other users. Thank you. -- sulfur 17:30, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Why? I think correcting spelling is a pretty harmless act -- on the contrary, I see it as benignant. — flamingspinach | (talk) 17:57, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

It's a policy. Feel free to point out spelling mistakes to people on their talk pages, but sometimes people are not always thrilled to have their own user pages edited. Therefore, despite you thinking that it may be beneficial, please try to avoid editing other peoples' user pages. -- sulfur 18:12, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

OK, fair enough. In my defense, the Wikipedia policy is rather different. I assumed that a similar policy would be in effect here, but it would seem that such is not the case. — flamingspinach | (talk) 18:25, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

Actually, the Wikipedia policy isn't that different from ours. For example, it talks about editing other user pages primarily being done by experienced editors, which by MA standards you are not. You had a single edit before going to Harry's page. It also talks about making edits only if they are non-trivial, and that they should not be done for trivial reasons. Fixing a couple of word spellings and an apostrophe is highly trivial. While we have more of a "no tolerance" policy on it, the spirit of the execution is nearly identical to Wikipedia. --OuroborosCobra ^talk 18:43, September 27, 2009 (UTC)

I think you may have slightly misread the article I linked. It says that non-trivial edits (i.e. edits substantial in scope) should not be made for trivial reasons. The entire paragraph there qualifies its statement to apply only to non-trivial edits, leaving trivial edits (those which change the article very little, such as, I take it, spelling corrections) to be covered by the points listed above the paragraph, which say only that "other users and bots may edit pages in your user space, though by convention your user page will usually not be edited by others". As to my level of experience, I hardly think that an experienced member with thousands of edits is somehow more qualified to correct typos than one who has less edits or experience; at least in Wikipedia's policy, note again that the mention of "experienced users" only applies to substantial edits, which seems perfectly reasonable to me.

All that aside, MA policy does appear to differ from Wikipedia's in that it clearly states that "no other user is allowed to edit your user page". So I would seem to have been out of line here. — flamingspinach | (talk) 10:32, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Basically you shouldn't edit other people's user pages as it's not polite. Some people, for instance, spell things differently than others. (British vs. American spellings) Some people spell things differently on purpose. Just leave their pages alone and you'll get along just fine. :) — Morder (talk) 10:40, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Some people even like to have their comments on their own talk page indented in a way that makes sense! :P Anyway, thanks for the advice. — flamingspinach | (talk) 10:48, September 28, 2009 (UTC)

Well, so you know we have a set format...and we expect all pages to follow the same format. But anyway, have fun editing. — Morder (talk) 10:54, September 28, 2009 (UTC)