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Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Project!

This is a centralized project for improving and maintaining Wikipedia's help system.

The current project collaboration is Assessment of help pages.

The trouble with help pages

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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

Goals

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Our 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:

  • Streamline it: simplify, consolidate, and reduce redundancies
  • Combat instruction creep and bloat wherever they appear
  • Increase its ease of navigation
  • Improve its accessibility
  • Edit help page text for clarity
  • Update obsolete information

How to get involved

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  1. Sign up to participate and get our project newsletter.
  2. Read the Help Project guidelines.
  3. Look for an open task and get involved with improving Wikipedia's help pages.
  4. Leave comments on the talk page.

Open tasks

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List of subpages
  • Revamp the WP:Task Center to make it suitable for use as the "Go-To Place" for instructing new editors on where they can help out.


Ongoing tasks

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  • Discuss problems and ideas related to Wikipedia's help system on the project talk page.
  • Tag any pages that should be within the scope of the project with {{Wikipedia Help Project}} on their talk pages.
  • Try to direct questions to the correct areas, and reduce the workload of editors in each of the specific areas, to relevant queries.
  • Ensure pages are written to answer common questions, clearly, in help pages to reduce the amount of 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. You can see recent changes of pages within this project's scope by using, Special:RecentChangesLinked/Category:Wikipedia_Help_Project_pages.
  • Address specific article concerns as listed below or on the talk page.

== News ==

Page alerts

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Templates for discussion

Requests for comments

Assessment

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Help articles by quality and importance
Quality Importance
Top High Mid Low NA Other Total
A 1 1
B 6 15 9 6 36
C 1 8 6 6 1 22
Start 1 3 2 20 1 27
Category 3 97 100
File 2 2
Project 5 9 12 4 20 50
Redirect 1 1 76 78
Template 5 2 11 4 59 81
NA 70 54 194 139 124 6 587
Assessed 89 91 238 180 379 7 984
Total 89 91 238 180 379 7 984
WikiWork factors (?) ω = 332 Ω = 3.86


Bird's-eye view

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To 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

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Pages requiring some work 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


Relevant Wikipedia project pages

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Main pages: Help:Directory and Help:Menu/Site map
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Other resources

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Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Help_Project&oldid=1191240832"