Editing Encyclopedia:Signatures (section)

== Purpose of signatures ==
Signatures on Wikipedia identify you as a user and your contributions to Wikipedia. They encourage [[WP:CIVIL|civility]], collaboration, and communication by identifying the author of a particular comment and the date and time at which it was made. Because of that, having an uncivil signature (especially one that makes any kind of [[WP:NPA|personal attacks]] toward someone else) is ''prohibited'' and, in some cases, the user will be [[WP:BLOCK|blocked]] from editing until the signature is changed. In most cases, anything that is not allowed as an account's [[WP:UPOL|username]] (in whole or in part) is also not allowed to be in a signature either.

Furthermore, signatures also serve a technical purpose: various [[WP:SCRIPT|user scripts]] and [[WP:BOT|talk-page archiving bots]], including [[User:lowercase sigmabot III|lowercase sigmabot III]], rely on their timestamps to know when to archive old threads. It's because of this that it's also important to not change the timestamp of any signatures, as doing so can lead to stale threads persisting longer, and after they would've otherwise been [[WP:ARCHIVE|archived]].