Wikipedia:About the sandbox

(Redirected from Help:Sandbox)

Image of the sandbox in the Wikipedia namespace showing the page title and sandbox header

Sandboxes, such as a user's sandbox or the more frequently edited Wikipedia:Sandbox, are pages designed for testing and experimenting with wiki syntax and the VisualEditor.

They were created as a place with fewer rules and policies than other pages on Wikipedia. For example, you don't have to follow the Manual of Style or reach community consensus before making a major change. However, they must not be used for malicious purposes, and policies such as no personal attacks, civility, and copyrights (such as non-free content criteria) still apply.

If you have an account, you can create your own sandbox in your userspace. You can find your user sandbox here. If you don't have an account, you can create your sandbox here. (And if it doesn't exist yet, feel free to create it!) For easy access, there is a link labeled "Sandbox" at the top right of every page on either a user icon menu Image of menu or between the "Talk" and "Preferences" links. You can also put {{My sandbox}} on your userpage.

Creating more sandboxes in your User namespace

To create another sandbox, first make a subpage to your user page in your User namespace:

  1. Decide on a name for the subpage, for example: sandbox2
  2. Enter the following in the Search box, using your actual username: User:Your username/sandbox2
  3. Then click on the reply, "Start the User:Your name/sandbox2 page."
  4. Once the page is created, adding the {{user sandbox}} template onto the subpage designates that page as another sandbox. Unlike your primary sandbox, Wikipedia does not automatically keep a way to link to these, so be sure either to bookmark it or add a link to it on your userpage; you can also use the Special:PrefixIndex special page to display all the subpages of your user page, including sandboxes.

List of sandboxes

Wikipedia namespace

Draft namespace

Talk namespace

User namespace

User talk namespace

Template namespace

  • {{Template sandbox}} and {{X1}} through {{X20}} exist for testing Template-space techniques.
  • {{TemplateStyles sandbox}}, for creating and testing pages with the sanitized-css content model, which can only be created in the template namespace.

Module namespace

  • Sub-pages of Module:Sandbox, for creating and testing pages with the scribunto content model, which can only be created in the module namespace.

Category namespace

File namespace

Portal namespace

Other

Bots

Some sandboxes are set up to be automatically cleaned by Cyberbot I, while some automatically have the sandbox header template re-added by Hazard-Bot.

See also