Help:Talk page
A talk page is a page in a talk namespace, for example, "Talk" or "User talk." Every page has a talk page that can be accessed by clicking the "Discussion" button at the top left.
Purpose of talk pages
A common misconception of talk pages is that they are meant to talk about the topic of the page itself. This is not the case; instead, it is meant to discuss improvements to a page when direct improvements are either not possible or potentially controversial. Other meta-discussion of the page itself can also take place here.
Adding comments
While the visual editor does not work on talk pages, there are very few standards on talk pages for formatting. In general, when replying to a comment, place your comment after that comment, and put one more colon (:) at the beginning than the comment you are replying to. For example, if you are replying to someone's original post, use one colon, and someone replying to that would use 2 colons.
Additionally, comments should be signed by typing four tildes (~~~~) at the end of the comment. This will come out as a signature looking like the following:
Editing/Deleting comments
You are welcome to edit your own comments before anybody replies to them. After you get at least one reply, please instead mark put <del> at the beginning of each deleted region and </del> at the end. Similarly, put <ins> at the beginning of each added region and </ins> at the end.
Please do not edit the comments of other people unless that person's comment was vandalized and you are restoring the original version, or they put a comment violating policy, which case the comment should simply be removed, assuming it has not gained any replies.
Topics
In general, all comments should be under a topic. Topics can be added using the "Add topic" button at the top right, or an existing topic can be edited using the "edit" button on the comment.
Archiving talk pages
Sometimes, a talk page may get very long. In that case, it can be archived by moving it to TALKNAME/Archive N. For example, Talk:Main Page would be moved to Talk:Main Page/Archive 1 for the first archive, Talk:Main Page/Archive 2 for the second, etc.
After the talk page is moved, a redirect will be created at the old location; simply replace the contents of the old talk page with the talk header, the archive navigation, and any other appropriate templates. The archived page's talk boxes should be replaced with a single talk box saying it is an archived talk page.
After this, the archived talk page should not be edited, besides for maintenance edits such as if the talk archive template's specification changes, and the talk box needs to be updated to fix that.
The set containing the page's talk page and the talk archives is called the page's talkspace.