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This is a centralized project for improving and maintaining Wikipedia's help system.
The current project collaboration is Assessment of help pages.
Assessed quality: 100% complete | |
Assessed importance: 100% complete | |
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! The help system has also become bloated, and continues to grow: in redundancy, in wordiness, and via instruction creep.
This WikiProject provides an oasis of order amidst the chaos - a place where editors can meet up, share opinions, and support each other with the mammoth task of help cleanup. Many of the help pages have few, if any regular maintainers, so having a place to record ideas can ensure that good ideas endure.
Please join. We can use all the help we can get. (Pun intended). See also Wikipedia:Help desk patrol
GoalsOur overall goal is to improve the help pages for readers, new editors and experienced editors alike. Our ongoing objectives with respect to the help system are to:
How to get involved
Open tasks
Ongoing tasks
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Page alertsRequests for comments
Assessment
Bird's-eye viewTo survey Wikipedia's huge collection of help pages, try the following pages:
Note that Wikipedia:Department directory lists Wikipedia's operational (task-oriented) pages, but itself could be considered a help page. |
Pages needing work
Pages requiring some work or further thought listed on this page (which also lists completed missions).
Relevant Wikipedia project pages
- Category:Wikipedia information pages and Category:Wikipedia how-to are the main subcategories listing help pages.
- Wikipedia:Help desk (interactive) for questions about how to use or edit Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Teahouse (interactive) helps new editors become accustomed to community culture, ask questions, and develop community relationships.
- Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia parent article on how and where editors can contribute to 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 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:Workshop's Sample one day workshop presents an outline for workshop leaders that also is a guide for new users.
- Wikipedia:Tips is the complete library of tips arranged by subject.
- Wikipedia:Tip of the day project develops and maintains the tip of the day templates which are displayed throughout Wikipedia.
- Wikipedia:Article Feedback Tool/Tutorial is a page linked to some articles encouraging readers to edit.
Related WikiProjects
- WikiProject Editor Retention – devising ways of keeping good editors here (new and old).
- WikiProject Manual of Style – coordinating pages which form the Manual of Style guidelines: reducing size, increasing readability and consistency.
- WikiProject Policy and Guidelines – one of their main goals is making policy and guideline pages easier to understand.
- WikiProject Usability – aims to make Wikipedia easy and pleasant to use, focussing on accessibility for all potential users, interface etc.