Wikipedia:Watchlist notices

This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting.

Shortcut WP:WLN

Wikipedia has five kinds of top-of-page messages that can be used to convey information or announcements to readers and editors. The "Sitenotice", found at MediaWiki:Sitenotice, is displayed at the top of all pages for all logged-in users, and for anonymous users if the following message is empty. MediaWiki:Anonnotice can be used to display information only to anonymous/IP users, not logged-in users. Alternatively, by 'blanking' the anonnotice and replacing it with nothing (not even a space or empty paragraph!), then the sitenotice can be used as a "logged-in users only" notice to display information only to editors. When "Anonnotice" contains nothing, no notice is shown to anonymous users. When it contains "-" it disables the message in favour of Sitenotice. If it contains anything else, it will be rendered to anonymous users instead of the Sitenotice (including a "hide" button). MediaWiki:Watchlist-messages is displayed at the top of Special:Watchlist for all users who use this feature. The CentralNotice, found at meta:Special:CentralNotice, is an extension which can display banners at the top of a select group of Wikimedia sites simultaneously. Geonotice, at Wikipedia:Geonotice, allows location-specific notices – and is a candidate for integration into MediaWiki.

In order to place a notice at the top of every registered user's watchlist, an editor can make a request at Mediawiki talk:Watchlist-messages. Once a consensus forms to list a notice, it is added, and the notice counter (the cookie-ID) is incremented. Notices should be approved for a fixed length of time after which point they will be removed.

Adding the template {{Edit protected}} to a request will ensure that an administrator is aware of it. This is particularly useful for uncontentious changes, such as correcting a typographical error in an existing message.