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A workpage is a subpage serving as a collection of material and work in progress that may or may not be incorporated into an article. Workpages should not be created in the mainspace.
A "sandbox" or "dumping ground" page associated with a specific article is useful in cases where an article is already reasonably developed (say, better than "Start") and as such can suffer deterioration by addition of sub-standard material. Such material can contain useful references or quotes that could, with some effort, be worked into the article to its benefit, but may make the article less useful to the reader when added inexpertly, or in the context of dubious editorializing.
There is a de facto tradition of keeping such material around for easy reference, in Talk: sub-pages, or rarely in User: namespace. This is similar to the "/Temp" sub-pages for the development of parallel versions of disputed or locked articles, except that the dumping-ground page doesn't aim at presenting a standalone article as much as providing a ready reference to material that might yet need to be worked into the article.
It is also common practice to place material removed from the live article to the article talkpage. This has the disadvantage that the content gets lost among the discussions, and is eventually archived and forgotten. If there is a real possibility that removed material may still be useful, it is preferable to place it somewhere else.
It might be a good idea to standardize this by giving such pages a standard location, either at something like [[Talk:{{{PAGENAME}}}/dumping-ground]], or even at a dedicated Dump: namespace.
Examples of existing dumping-ground pages:
- Talk:Caucasian race/Dumping ground
- Talk:Hungarian prehistory/Dumping ground
- Talk:Norfolk State University/Notes
Temp pages and forks in userspace (see also Category:Wikipedia workpages):
- User:Jclemens/Acharya S (user copy of deleted article)
- User:Moreschi/ROAE (draft page later moved into article namespace)
- User:B-RAM CPPF/Sandbox
- Talk:Katana/Draft