Wikipedia sandbox: your own page for practice edits

How to open your own sandbox

1. Log in to a registered account. Only registered accounts get a personal sandbox.
2. Click Sandbox at the top right of any page. On the Vector 2022 skin it sits in the user menu behind the person icon.
3. The link opens Special:MyPage/sandbox, which is your page User:YourName/sandbox. The first time, it opens in the editor with the {{User sandbox}} notice already at the top.
4. Write, preview and publish as on any page. Come back through the same link whenever you like.

The {{User sandbox}} notice tells readers the page is a sandbox, not an article, and by default asks search engines not to index it. Unless you hide it, the notice also offers a button to submit the page as a draft for review, which is how many first articles start.

What rules apply in a sandbox

Sandboxes were made as places with fewer rules than other pages. You do not have to follow the Manual of Style or reach consensus before a big change, and nothing in a sandbox is expected to last. Some rules never switch off: no personal attacks, civility, and copyright, including the limits on non-free content. A sandbox must not be used for anything malicious.

Adding a second sandbox

Any subpage of your user page can be a sandbox. Wikipedia only links the first one for you, so the others need a bookmark or a link from your user page.

1. Choose a name, for example sandbox2.
2. Search for User:YourName/sandbox2 and choose to start that page.
3. Make {{User sandbox|a=yes}} the first line. The a=yes part changes the notice from the user sandbox to a user sandbox.
4. Find all your subpages later on Special:PrefixIndex, or list them inside the notice with its list parameter.

Shared sandboxes for every kind of page

Besides personal sandboxes, the English Wikipedia keeps shared ones in most namespaces, so you can test the kind of page you will really edit. Some are cleaned automatically by bots, so do not leave anything there you want to keep.

For templates and modules there is a fuller method, with a sandbox copy and a test-cases page; see template sandboxes and test cases and Lua modules.

Without an account: temporary accounts

Since 4 November 2025, people who edit the English Wikipedia without logging in are given a temporary account, named with a tilde, the year and a number, which lasts about 90 days on that browser. Temporary accounts can create pages only in the Draft namespace and on talk pages. They cannot create pages in the User namespace, so they have no personal sandbox: the place for their experiments is Wikipedia:Sandbox.

From sandbox to article

A sandbox can hold the first draft of an article, but the Draft namespace was made for that job in December 2013. Drafts are not indexed by most search engines, and a draft becomes eligible for deletion after six months without a substantive edit.

• Publishing directly. Autoconfirmed editors move the page into the article namespace with the Move function; newer and logged-out editors have to request the move.
• Asking for review. Any editor can add {{subst:submit}} to the top of a draft to send it through Articles for creation, where an experienced editor reviews it first.

Where the Sandbox link came from

Proposals for a My sandbox link go back to at least 2008. After a proposal in December 2011, the English Wikipedia added it as a gadget in February 2012, and in April 2015 the gadget was replaced by the SandboxLink extension. Help:My sandbox lists 82 Wikipedia language editions that show the link, from Arabic to Zulu.

The link cannot be switched off in preferences. Editors who do not want it hide it with one line in their personal CSS: li#pt-sandbox { display: none !important; }.