Help:Staging area

A staging area is a place where you can take the time to finish something. In this wiki, any logged-in user can use subpages of a User page as a staging area for new pages and templates, or major modifications of existing content. If you wish to make a new page in a staging area, here's how to do it.

1. Follow the link at the top of any page (or elsewhere, if you've moved it) to your User page.
2. Put a link from somewhere, such as a to-do list on your User page, to the desired staging page name. This gives a red (edit) link to a new page. If you're making a subpage of an existing page, it generally makes the most sense to put the link directly on the existing page. In that case, you may make the link with a simple slash in front of the subpage name: [[/Subpage]]. Preview to make sure that it links where you want it to go. If that wikicode doesn't make a link to a subpage, that's because the page is in a namespace which doesn't support subpages. In those namespaces, the slash is just another character in the page name. It is all right to make subpages of subpages, though, so you may use this to make subpages below your to-do page.
   • So,if your game is called IceGlotz (or if you want to use that as a pretend name until you decide what to call it), you could simply put [[/IceGlotz]] on your User page. (You can call it something else inside the page.)
   • Another way to do this is to enter a name for your new staging area as a subpage of your User page, by entering something like User:WhoYouAre/IceGlotz into the Search box. This gives a page which does not yet have any text, but you may edit it. Use this method if you want the new page to be an orphan (probably because you plan to move it to its final home soon).
3. Edit and save as much as you have of your page under the staging name. (If you don't have anything more than a bare idea for a page, put that into a to-do list, not a staging page. Of course, a to-do list is a good place to link to the staging page, especially since "Work more on [[User:WhoAmI/IceGlotz]]" is on there.)
4. Take as long as you need to refine your game or other creation. This is a good time to ask other users to suggest names for your game or template, or any other refinements that might be hard to change later, such as template parameters.
5. When the page is ready, if it ever is, just use the page-rename (move) feature of the wiki to put it into its final place, probably in the main namespace. If it's a game, this is the time to put it into the list of games.

By default, moving a page leaves a redirect at the old location, so anyone who comes looking for the moved page will find it. If you move it to the wrong place, you can instantly undo the move (see the link in Special:Recentchanges). Moving a page via the link preserves the page's edit history (as copying the wikitext does not).

Templates can be done in the same way, since they respect redirects. But once a template has moved out of your User space, each page which uses it should eventually be updated to use the new template name.