Gentoo Wiki:Discussion

With few exceptions, every regular page on the Gentoo Linux Wiki is accompanied by a "talk page" where the content of the page can be discussed by readers and editors. These pages can be visited by following the "Discussion" link at the top of the page, just above the page title.

(The word "Discussion" may appear dark, in which case there has already been some discussion on the page, or light if the talk page has not yet been edited. Feel free to create a talk page when you need to leave a comment, but don't create an empty page just to change the appearance of the word "Discussion".)

There are actually two different kinds of talk pages in use on this wiki, traditional MediaWiki talk pages and newer Flow pages.

Traditional talk pages
Most talk pages on this wiki are regular MediaWiki pages where standard wikicode can be used and comments should be signed using four tildes in a row. In rare cases, you may use three tildes or five, as shown below, but four tildes is best. This is, of course, assuming that your username is JRandomUser and you're leaving your comment at the time shown above.

It is a common convention when using traditional talk pages to add new comments at the bottom of the page (and replies or followup comments below existing ones). Thus, the flow of the discussion is always top-down.

More information about traditional talk pages can be found at mw:Help:Talk pages.

Flow talk pages
A few talk pages, notably Gentoo Wiki:Feedback, are "Flow" pages, which do not require signatures (the software does that for you), but may still contain wikicode.

In a "flow" discussion, newer sections are at the top, but the flow of the conversation is still top-down within each section. (Most of this is handled automatically by the user interface, so you can't really get it wrong.)

More information about Flow talk pages can be found at mw:Help:Flow/Quick tour.