Wikipedia:Help Project

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For information on WikiProjects in general, see Wikipedia:WikiProjects.

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Project! This is a centralized project for improving and maintaining Wikipedia's help system. Our goal is to improve the help pages. For experienced editors this means finding accurate help easily. For new readers and editors this means providing the help to become constructive editors as efficiently as possible (focusing on introductory pages, tutorials and ease of navigation).

The trouble with help pages The help pages of Wikipedia are a rabbit warren of various types of pages, written to differing levels of technical expertise and in widely varying styles. The effect can be quite overwhelming! Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have grown overwhelmingly complicated, especially for new users. The number of pages and links has become difficult to manage also, for example there are at least four pages about tables (plus more on other sites) with it being unclear which is most suitable for a given problem. Even the help page about help pages admits there are serious problems: Wikipedia's help pages are of varying complexity, from basic introductions to technical documents. This variety however has its flaws: it is easy to navigate to a page that contains concepts that have not already been covered, or is overly complicated for one's needs. For some idea of the scale of the problem, the main help landing page (Help:Contents) now gets around 10,000 hits per day. Although it has undergone a number of revisions over the years, anecdotal evidence suggests that its current form is not proving very useful, either to new or experienced editors. Improving this and other key help pages could have significant benefits for editor recruitment and retention. Main goals Apart from our main goal to improve the help system, we hope to provide an oasis of [apparent] order in all the chaos - or at least a place where editors of the different sections can meet up and get further opinions without having to understand the entire structure of the help system. This should be especially useful as many of the help pages have few, if any regular maintainers, and a good idea may get lost in time if it seems there is no other support. Our mission is to: Make Wikipedia's help pages more accessible Make Wikipedia's help interface more navigable Improve individual help pages' text Reduce unneeded complexity and redundancy Continually maintain help pages by updating obsolete information How you can help Chances are if you have come to this project you have been editing the help pages yourself and have aided the project already. This is an open project and anyone is free to join in any discussions / projects without being listed as a participant, but you are of course welcome to choose a comfy chair and sign up for moral support. All kinds of comments are welcome on the discussion page.

News 15 May - the wub has posted a report on his fellowship work so far, and plans for the future. 3 May - Even more statistics about this project's pages are now available, including word count and various readability scores. Fun fact: We have 2 help pages which are over 20,000 words long! 27 Apr - A table of pageview statistics is now available for all pages in Category:WikiProject Help Project. This should be helpful in prioritising improvement work and finding redundant pages. 23 Apr - the wub has been appointed as a Wikimedia Community Fellow to help improve Wikipedia's help pages. You can read more about his plans at Wikipedia:Help Project/Community fellowship or in this Signpost article. Open tasks / current projects List of subpages /Community fellowship Identify areas of the help system that and are in need of some attention. Improve navigation between help pages developing nav templates in /Overview, with the possibility of using them on the help pages to aid users too. Navbox - Wikipedia:Help Project/Overview/Accessible Nav Box New template that could be useful: {{Breadcrumb2}} Developing more "introductions" in the vein of /Introduction to talk pages /Introduction to policies guidelines Develop some general guidelines for help pages - past draft at Wikipedia:Help Project/guidelines Cleanup Category:Wikipedia help and subcategories. Fix the introductory pages, pages 2 and 3 are really just lists of links, some of which are way too heavy for their position in an introduction! Ongoing tasks Discuss problems and ideas related to Wikipedia's help system on the talk page or through the links in the following section. Tag any pages that should be within the scope of the project with the project banner {{Help Project}} on their talk pages - all main pages covered just the odd ones that we may have missed, and essays/guidelines mostly not tagged until further thoughts.. Try to direct questions to the correct areas and reduce workload of editors in each of the specific areas to relevant queries. Ensure pages are written to answer common questions clearly in help pages and reduce unnecessary questioning on talk pages. The help system needs watchdogs to check for test edits on articles and talk pages and to redirect misplaced questions by new users.(Help:Contents, all its subpages, and all the pages linked to from its subpages, etc.) You can see recent changes of pages within this projects scope using this link. Address specific article concerns as listed below or on the talk page.

Articles needing attention

Articles requiring attention or further thought listed on this page (which also lists completed missions).

Help articles that need attention (edit)

Page in Help: namespace	Page in Wikipedia: namespace	Comments
Pages in Category:Wikipedia multilingual support		Should be cleaned up and some possibly merged together.
Help:Diff		As of May 2012, needs updating for the new diff formatting (assuming that doesn't get reverted!)
n/a	Wikipedia:How to edit a page	not very easy to read - ouch!
Help:Account	Wikipedia:Account	No help page exists, WP space one is very TLDR/unfriendly.
Help:Files	Wikipedia:Images Wikipedia:Picture tutorial	unable to locate succint and helpful info on the parameters for using images easily - have found it at Wikipedia:Extended image syntax maybe this isn't linked very well
Help:Files	Wikipedia:Images Wikipedia:Image use policy Wikipedia:Extended image syntax Wikipedia:Preparing images for upload Wikipedia:Graphics tutorials Wikipedia:Captions Wikipedia:Gallery tag Wikipedia:Creation and usage of media files Wikipedia:Finding images tutorial Wikipedia:Uploading images Wikipedia:Ten things you may not know about images on Wikipedia Wikipedia:Picture tutorial	A lot of image pages with various amounts of duplication.
Help:Footnotes	Wikipedia:Manual of Style (footnotes)
Help:Wiki markup		could do with making both simpler and more comprehensive!
	Wikipedia:Starting an article Wikipedia:Article creation Wikipedia:Your first article	3 pages on starting an article
Help:Pending changes	Wikipedia:Pending changes	High profile feature being rolled out June 15, 2010. It could use some love!

See also

• Category:Wikipedia help projects

Related WikiProjects

• Wikipedia:WikiProject Usability -aims to make Wikipedia easy and pleasant to use, focussing on accessibility for all potential users, interface etc.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Manual of Style coordinating pages which form the Manual of Style guidelines, reducing size increasing readability and consistency.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Policy and Guidelines one of their main goals is making policy and guideline pages easier to understand.
• Wikipedia:WikiProject Contents smaller project that deals with issues pertaining to the overall arrangement of Wikipedia's contents/navigation system.
• Wikipedia:Tutorial Drive tasked with creating tutorials - Inactive

Relevant Wikipedia project pages

• Wikipedia:Help desk for questions about how to use or edit Wikipedia.
• Help:Getting started links to the basics needed to use, comment on, and contribute to Wikipedia.
• Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is a whole help guide.
• Wikipedia:A Primer for newcomers explains editing and policy basics.
• Wikipedia:Article wizard 2.0 helps to guide editors creating their first article.
• Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Adventure is an interactive tutorial for new editors.
• Wikipedia:Annotated article illustrates the different sections of an article.
• Wikipedia:User page design center is a one stop shop for user page design.
• Wikipedia:Workshop's Sample one day workshop presents an outline for workshop leaders that also is a guide for new users.
• Wikipedia:Workshop for Women presents issues for women editors and those who would hold workshops for them.
• Wikipedia:Teahouse helps new editors become accustomed to community culture, ask questions, and develop community relationships.
• Wikipedia:Tips develops and maintains the tip of the day templates which are displayed throughout Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia:MediaWiki is a central point for collecting info about Wikipedia's use of the MediaWiki software.
• Wikipedia:Article Feedback Tool/Tutorial is a page linked to some articles encouraging readers to edit.

Related pages in Sister projects

Help:Contents on Wikibooks	Help:Contents on Commons	Help:Contents on Wikinews	Help:Contents on Wikiquote	Help:Contents on Wikisource	Help:Contents on Wikiversity	Help:Contents on Wiktionary	Help:Help on Meta	Help:Contents on MediaWiki.org