Wikipedia:User preferences help

The preferences dialog allows you to personalize some aspects of Wikipedia. They will apply only when you are logged in.

QuickBar

This is the list of links to the various special pages. You may optionally have it appear at the right or left side of each page. There's no option yet to have it appear at the top or bottom of the page. Currently, the QuickBar must be enabled to allow you to access some features such as moving (renaming) a page.

Password

To change your password, enter your old password, the new password, and the new password a second time. (If you're merely changing the other preferences, you do not need to enter your password.)

Skins

A Wikipedia skin is a style of page display. Try them out; they are mostly cosmetic. A skin may override some of your other settings on this page; some would call this a bug rather than a feature.

Rendering math

Wikipedia allows you to enter mathematical equations as TeX code. These options let you control how that code is rendered into PNG images.

• Always render PNG: Always make a PNG image from the TeX code.
• HTML if very simple or else PNG: If the TeX code is very simple, like "x = 3", render it as HTML. For more complex code, render as PNG.
• HTML if possible or else PNG: This option tries really hard to use HTML, but if it's too complicated, then it renders it as PNG.
• Leave it as TeX: Don't convert the TeX code, just show it. This is primarily for text-based browsers like Lynx.
• Recommended for modern browsers. If you use a web browser that was released in the past year or so, use this option.
  • Not wanting to sound like I'm complaining, but seeing as the label of the option is beyond meaningless, please could someone add a sentence or two here describing what the feature does, exactly? ... Thanks -- Timwi 20:12 29 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Miscellaneous options

• Show hoverbox over wiki links. On some browsers, putting the mouse pointer over a hyperlink can display the name of the link. This option's setting seems to have little or no control over this feature, at least with some browsers.
• Underline links. Normally, link text will be underlined. Optionally, you may request that links not be underlined, although your browser may not respect this setting. Normally links that are not underlined can still be recognized by color. However, one can then not distinguish between two consecutive words being a single link or two links, without pointing at the words with the cursor.
• Format broken links like this. This option is enabled by default. Normally, links to articles which do not yet exist (like the weather in London[?] or Tumbolia[?]) will appear underlined and in red. You may optionally make these appear as a trailing question mark link (something like this?). This makes them stand out less, but it's kind of confusing to some people.
• Justify paragraphs. You may choose to have paragraphs displayed with full justification. Maybe someday Wikipedia will even display them that way.
• Hide minor edits in recent changes. Registered users may choose to mark edits as being minor (meaning fixes too trivial for trusting users to check up on). It applies to Recent Changes and Enhanced Recent Changes, but not to the Watchlist. It also affects Related changes, but currently in an odd way: if the last edit of a page linking to the current page was minor, than neither that nor the last major change is shown.
• Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers). Group recent changes per day by article, display the titles of the changed articles in order from new to old latest change, or in the case of hiding minor edits, latest major change (send ideas for improvement to Magnus Manske, the author of this feature).
• Auto-number headings. This adds hierarchical outline-style numbering to headers in articles.
• Remember password across sessions.
• Edit box has full width. If this box is checked, the edit box (when you click "Edit this page") will be the width of the browser window, minus the quickbar width.
• Edit pages on double click. If this box is checked, you can double-click on a page to edit it. This option requires Javascript to be enabled in your browser.
• Watch new and modified articles. If this option is selected, any articles that you create or modify will be automatically added to your watchlist.
• Mark all edits minor by default. This option automatically selects the "This is a minor edit" checkbox when you edit pages.
• Show preview before edit box and not after it. If you select this option, the preview will be displayed above the exit box when you click the "Show preview" button while editing a page.
• Disable page caching. This turns off page caching. This is useful if you're experiencing problems of seeing outdated versions of pages, but this comes at a cost of longer loading times.

Textbox and Time

• Textbox dimensions. Here you can set up your preferred dimensions for the textbox used for editing page text.
• Time diff. This is the number of hours to be added or subtracted from UTC to find your time zone. This time zone is used when calculating displayed page update timestamps, and may become temporarily incorrect from time to time if you observe daylight saving time -- don't forget to update it to match your local time, because the Wiki doesn't know where you are or precisely when you celebrate DST. (Also, the server's clock may be slightly offset from reality, much as Wikipedia articles may be.) A scattering of typical (and possibly incorrect!) time diff values are below. If yours isn't listed, try this link (http://www.timeanddate.com/time/abbreviations) or add and subtract a few hours as needed.
  • -8 (DST -7) California
  • -5 (DST -4) New York
  • 0 (DST 1) UK
  • 1 (DST 2) most of Europe
  • 3 Moscow
  • 9 Japan
  • 10 Melbourne
  • 12 Pago Pago
  • -9 Juneau
  • -10 (DST -9) Hawaii

E-mail, search, etc.

• Your e-mail: You may optionally register your e-mail address (it will not be shown publicly on the site). This will enable you to reset your password by clicking the "Mail me a new password" box on the log in screen, if you forget it. Additionally, it will enable other registered users to send e-mail to you from the "E-mail this user" link on your user page unless you've checked the disable box (see below).
• Disable e-mail from other users: If you check this, users will not be able to send you e-mail by way of the "E-mail this user" feature.
• Your nickname: You may optionally specify a nickname that is different from your username when you enter your signature with ~~~ or ~~~~.
• Number of titles on recent changes: You may select the number of changes which will be shown by default on the Recent Changes and Watchlist page. Once on those pages, links are provided for other options.
• Threshold for stub display: You may set the number of characters (e.g. 500, 1000, etc.) in an article below which links to the article will be displayed in a different color. Helps to identify stubs.
• Hits to show per page: You may choose the number of results returned on each page of search results.
• Lines to show per hit is somewhat cryptic; specifying a number n means: "do not show any context if the search term occurs beyond line n in the article"; here a paragraph, as well as the blank line between two paragrahs, each count as one "line"; line breaks in the source, even when not affecting the lay-out of the article (and even when not directly visible in the edit box of the article), affect the line count. Setting the parameter to 5000 or more gives context for every occurrence.
• Characters of context per line: the number of characters of context per occurrence; however, the context is anyway restricted to the "line" (see above) it occurs in. To get the whole line, put a large number like 5000.

Notes

You cannot change your username. If for some reason you feel unbearably compelled to change it, create a new username and mark the old one for deletion.

You cannot indicate personal information (such as your real name) here, but you may do so on a page named after your username in the User: namespace. (That's available as a link on the line which says "You are logged in as user WhatsYourName" above the preferences panel. Feel free to start your own page with anything you want to say about yourself on it.)