Help:My sandbox
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. |
This page is not a sandbox. It should not be used for test editing. To experiment, please use the Wikipedia sandbox, your user sandbox, the other sandboxes or the allocated sandbox for this template, if any. |
My sandbox is a feature which gives you a place to practice editing, either to build a draft for later publication in the main encyclopedia, or just to practice formatting with wiki markup syntax. If you have an account, you will see a link in the upper right corner of the screen that says "Sandbox"; this will take you to your sandbox.
Note: You can also use the community sandbox to experiment with editing. |
The link opens a user subpage Special:MyPage/sandbox. If the page does not exist then it is opened for editing with {{User sandbox}} added to the top of the editing window. The template notifies readers that the page is a sandbox, not an article, and it prevents the page from being indexed by search engines.
Renaming an existing sandbox page
If you want to rename (move) your sandbox, see Wikipedia:How to rename your sandbox.
Customizing
Removing
The sandbox link was previously a gadget but is now a built-in feature. It cannot be disabled in preferences but it can be removed by placing this in your CSS:
li#pt-sandbox { display: none !important; }
The feature lacks feature-settings to support customization; however, it can be removed and a JavaScript version created in userspace.
Moving to toolbar
To create a toolbar link to Special:MyPage/sandbox.
mw.util.addPortletLink(
'p-personal',
'/w/index.php?title=Special:MyPage/sandbox&action=edit&preload=Template:User_sandbox/preload&editintro=Template:User_sandbox',
'My sandbox',
'pt-mysandbox',
'Go to your sandbox',
null,
'#pt-preferences'
);
To remove autoedit:
var NoEditSandbox = $('#pt-mysandbox a').slice(0,1).attr('href', '/wiki/User:' + wgUserName + '/sandbox');
My subpages
If you have multiple sandboxes or other user subpages, it may be more useful to show a list of your subpages:
- Ensure you replace username with your username.
mw.util.addPortletLink(
'p-personal',
'/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/User:username',
'My subpages',
'pt-mysubpages',
'Show my subpages',
null,
'#pt-preferences'
);
Discussions
Proposals for My sandbox go back to at least 2008,[1] but the defining proposal was in December 2011.[2] A Gadget proposal in January 2012 resulted in the addition of My Sandbox.[3] The gadget was replaced by mw:Extension:SandboxLink in April 2015.[4]