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, or the other sandboxes. |
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.
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.
Moving an existing sandbox page
If you have an existing sandbox that is not named "sandbox", then you can move it. See Help:How to move a page.
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]