Forum:Help pages

As you might have noticed, we no longer have help pages - and I think we should discuss how to go about alleviating that condition. I don't think we need to create them from scratch; we can get the ones we need e.g. from Wikipedia and adapt/shorten them to fit our needs.

Should we start a project or simply collect which pages we need here and people will copy them at their leisure? Other suggestions? -- Porter21 (talk) 19:03, 11 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Can't we run a bot to import them and remove links to pages that do not exist on the Vault? Tagaziel 19:59, 11 December 2011 (UTC)


 * Hmm, if this is coming from Porter, I don't think that'll be possible Tag ;). I'd be happy to help you and run mine on it if you want thoough Porter. Either way, again, I'm happy to give you help in exchange for guidance. TheGuardianCalligraphy.pngGuardianoftheWastesTag.png 21:39, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

We could start off by copying the public domain help pages at http://www.mediawiki.org - no bots required really. Importing might create a bit of a mess in the template department but that should be manageable. We'd still have to go over them and see whether stuff needs to be added; for example, our custom table classes ("va-table" etc) would need to be added to Help:Tables.

In addition, there are a few help pages which, while referenced on our wiki, aren't included in this package (e.g. Help:Disambiguation, Help:Cite or Help:Interwiki link).

So while importing can provide a starting point, some manual work will still be required. -- Porter21 (talk) 23:13, 11 December 2011 (UTC)


 * To be honest, there is only about 20-30 help pages that we need. So I don't think such a small task really needs a project. It is something on my to-do list as well, so will probably get done at leisure. As for things like Help:Disambiguation, they don't exits in the help space on mediawiki, but do exist on Wikipedia - another source we can use if attributed. However, we already have such sections in our own policies. So do we split them from policy or redirect help pages to the relevant policy? The real issue with these kinda help pages, is that they are not defined by the software, but by the community using the software. As such, our method of dealing with disambiguation differs to that of other wiki projectss like Wikipedia. So such helps pages would most likely have to be made ourselves. — User avatar tag.gif Avatar talk.png 13:09, 12 December 2011 (UTC)


 * OK, seems someone was busy this weekend and has got most of the pages up and running =P — User avatar tag.gif Avatar talk.png 13:46, 12 December 2011 (UTC)


 * I imported them and have done some basic fixes. Currently I'm stripping out the templates we don't need/want, but I haven't gone over each individual page yet. I think some of the stuff can be trimmed (there is some advanced stuff on those help pages which likely only serves to confuse inexperienced editors, i.e. the people most likely to use the pages) and there are still quite a few redlinks which need to be fixed. But yeah, it's a start.
 * Regarding pages like Help:Disambiguation, I'd still make a separate help page which simply explains the concept and links to the policies in the "see also" section. The reason that there are so many links to that page is that it's used in disambiguation and as such I think people coming to that page are likely to look for an explanation of the term rather than our policies. I think e.g. wikipedia:Help:Disambiguation fits that bill rather nicely without conflicting with our policies (only the examples need to be adapted, naturally). -- Porter21 (talk) 14:22, 12 December 2011 (UTC)

These are the help pages which are currently appearing on Special:WantedPages, i.e. ones that are linked from wiki pages somewhere:

Naturally, some of these can probably be redirected and we don't need all the rest, but I figured I'd share the list. -- Porter21 (talk) 19:53, 13 December 2011 (UTC)