Help:Temporary accounts

A temporary account is an automatically created account. It is an alternative to using the user's IP address as an identifier in the page history.

Features
Temporary accounts do not have all of the features of registered accounts. Temporary accounts can have user pages and user talk pages. They can receive notifications and see a banner about messages on their own user talk pages. The IP address used with a temporary account can be seen by trusted users, such as admins.

The temporary account's identity is stored in a cookie. The account will continue to exist until the cookie expires or is removed. This mechanism allows temporary users to keep the same account when their IP addresses change. As of 2023, on Wikipedia and other wikis hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, the account cookie will expire after 12 months. After that, the user will not have access to the account. After the account expires, if the user wants to contribute again, a new account will automatically be created.