userentered

Userentered is a descriptor used in computing to indicate data or content that has been supplied directly by a human user through an interface, rather than generated by the system or collected by sensors. The term is commonly encountered in data models, form handling, and user interfaces to distinguish input that originates from a person.

In practice, applications may annotate fields or records as userentered to separate them from default, computed, or imported values. Databases, form processors, and data pipelines sometimes track whether an input originated from a user to aid validation, auditing, or provenance. This distinction can influence how data is treated downstream, such as in validation rules, error reporting, or permission checks.

Userentered data has implications for quality and usability. Because it comes from humans, it can be incomplete, inconsistent, or noisy. Systems often apply validation, normalization, and error handling to ensure reliability. From a security perspective, userentered content requires careful sanitization, escaping, and input validation to prevent injection and other attacks. Privacy considerations also arise, as userprovided data may include personally identifiable information that should be minimized and protected.

Examples of userentered input include text entered into web forms, survey responses, comments in issue trackers, and user-configured options. In data governance, tagging data as userentered supports audit trails and lineage tracking. The concept is language-agnostic, though naming conventions vary (for instance, user-entered or user_entered in codebases).