Wikipedia:WikiProject User warnings/Help:Introduction
This page is a basic introduction to the use of user warning templates to help combat vandalism. For a basic introduction to Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Introduction.
About user warning templates
Any edit deliberately intended to damage Wikipedia's content, attack a person, or oppose the community is called vandalism (see Vandalism for a general list of such actions). Particularly, edits which go against Wikipedia's policies and guidelines would be considered such.
If you spot someone vandalising Wikipedia, you should revert their changes to a previous version. You can leave a message on their talk page to notify them that they've violated a policy or guideline, and that you've reverted their changes. There are various user warning templates available to simplify this by outputting automatic, standardised messages directly onto the talk page.
Using user warning templates
To use a user warning template, choose a standardised template from the main page of the WikiProject on User Warnings or a legacy template from Category:User warning templates. On the talk page you'd like to place the message on, type the name of the template in curly brackets; for example, if you want to use Template:test1, you can type {{test1}}.
By default, the template tag will remain on the page and load the template every time the page is viewed. Unfortunately, this has an important impact on Wikipedia's server resources and leaves hundreds of pages (ironically) open to vandalism, since any edit to the template will then show up on every page the tag is placed on. For these reasons, user warning templates should always be substituted for text. This is done automatically when you add the prefix "subst:" to a template tag. For example, if you wanted to use the same template as above, you would use {{subst:test1}}.