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Shortcut: WP:HELPWP

Welcome to the 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).

[edit] Main goals

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!

Chances are if you have come to this project you have been editing the help pages yourself and have aided the project already. 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.

This is an open project and free to join in any discussions / projects without being listed as a participent, but you are of course welcome to choose a comfy chair and sign up for moral support. This project is built on the foundations of several other battles to make some sense of the chaos including the Helping Hands Project, each time the situation seems to be improve, hopefully this time we can tame it!

[edit] Open tasks / current projects

• Identify areas of the help system that and are in need of some attention.
• make more sense of the help system
  • developing nav templates in /Overview, with the possibility of using them on the help pages to aid users too.
• creating a very easy to understand introduction to wikipedia, based around the simple nav box in /Overview some intro guides need to be created- currently:
  • /Introduction to talk pages
  • /Introduction to policies guidelines
• Develop some general guidelines if possible
  • drafting in Wikipedia:Help Project/guidelines
• Address specific article concerns as listed below or on the talk page.

[edit] 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 the this link..

[edit] Future tasks

• 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!

[edit] Active discussions and request for comment

Help-related discussions that would benefit from more input or are of interest to the help pages in general, or requests for further opinions ( a mini Rfc for help page editors)

• Wikipedia:Requests for comment/new users Rfc on interactions with new users, includes sections on:

Introduction,Tutorial, newcomers help page and more.

• Rd232 recently edited Help:Edit summary quite a lot and welcomes any feedback.
• Recent discussion on adding live help link to the help header bar Wikipedia_talk:Help_desk#Adding_.23wikipedia-en-help_to_the_header
• Recent changes to make MediaWiki:Fancycaptcha-createaccount friendlier, like this [1]
• Attempt to construct a(nother) help navbox or two /Overview

[edit] Articles needing attention

Articles requiring attention or further thought listed on this page.

[edit] Scope

The principal index pages.

• Help:Contents
  • Help:Contents/Account settings and maintenance
  • Help:Contents/Browsing Wikipedia
  • Help:Contents/Communication
  • Help:Contents/Editing Wikipedia
  • Help:Contents/Getting started
  • Help:Contents/Images and media
  • Help:Contents/Links
  • Help:Contents/Policies and guidelines
  • Help:Contents/Resources and lists
  • Help:Contents/Technical information
  • Help:Contents/The Wikipedia community
  • Help:Contents/Tracking changes
• Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia (270k, may take a while to render)
• Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual
• Wikipedia:Accessibility guideline

Categories

• Category:Wikipedia how-to how-to guides for various Wikipedia processes and practises
• Category:Wikipedia basic information this category is a grey area, it is designated an admin category but also includes tutorials and a few other help pages.

And of course the Help: namespace.

Pages already tagged for the project are listed in Category:WikiProject Help Project.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Uconventional 'WikiProject' structures

• Wikipedia:Help desk where would we be without them !
• Wikipedia:Tips responsible for developing and maintaining the tip of the day templates which are displayed throughout Wikipedia,
• Wikipedia:Article wizard 2.0 A shiny new attempt to guide editors creating their first article.

• Wikipedia:Books and its subpages appear to be a collaboration.
• Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual (and subpages) has a dedicated following.

• Wikipedia:MediaWiki - a central point for collecting info about Wikipedia's use of the MediaWiki software

[edit] Related pages in Sister projects

• Wikibooks:Help:Contents
• Wikinews:Help:Introduction
• Wikiquote:Help:Contents
• Wikisource:Help:Contents
• Wikispecies:Help:Contents
• Wiktionary:Help:Contents
• Commons:Help:Contents
• Meta:Help:Help

[edit] Potentially helpful categories

Category:Wikipedia articles that are too technical a couple of syntax type help files included, but mostly articles

[edit] Templates

For talk pages related to the project add {{Help Project}} to the top of the talk page.

	WikiProject Help	HelpWikipedia:Help ProjectTemplate:Help ProjectHelp articles
v • d • e This article is within the scope of WikiProject Help, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of the help system on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.

For your user page you can add {{User wikipedia/Help Project}} to show participation.

This user is a member of Wikipedia's Help Project.

[edit] Participants

1. Ben (Talk to Me)
2. Go for it! (aka The Transhumanist ) 13:56, 14 January, 2006 (founded)
3. HereToHelp (talk • contribs) 14:10, 16 January 2006 (UTC)
4. Gareth Aus 22:56, 17 January 2006 (UTC)
5. --Aude (talk | contribs) 03:41, 31 January 2006 (UTC)
6. Bjelleklang - talk 09:21, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
7. Commander Keane 18:04, 16 February 2006 (UTC) Interested in developing the help infrastructure for new users.
8. AtionSong
9. -- Quiddity (talk)
10. Pretzels^Talk! 17:34, 8 November 2008 (UTC)
11. -- Daniel Jones (talk) 11:25, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
12. Elder Kibwe (talk) 14:36, 21 August 2009 (UTC)
13. L∴V 11:46, 6 September 2009 (UTC)
14. -— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 21:10, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
15. œ^™ 04:09, 28 September 2009 (UTC)
16. Arbitrarily0 ^(talk) 23:22, 4 October 2009 (UTC)
17. Rd232 ^talk 07:24, 29 October 2009 (UTC)