Wikipedia:Help Project

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

WikiProject Help

Shortcut	WP:HELPWP
Category	Wikipedia help
Project banner template	{{WikiProject Help}}
Userbox	{{User wikipedia/Help Project}}
CSB	Relevant for Countering systemic bias
Help:Contents

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).

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 participant, 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!

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

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, some intro guides need to be created- currently:
  • Help:Help
    • Wikipedia:Help Project/Overview/Introductions
      • /Introduction to talk pages
      • /Introduction to policies guidelines
    • Navbox - Wikipedia:Help Project/Overview/Accessible Nav Box
• Develop some general guidelines if possible
  • drafting in 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 the 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)
Article in Help: namespace	Article in Wikipedia: namespace	Comments
na	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:Graphics in two modes 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!

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

And of course the Help: namespace.

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

Categories

• Category:Wikipedia help and its subcategories. See full contents here:

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

Unconventional '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:User page design center One stop shop for user page design...

• 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

See also

• Category:Wikipedia help projects
• Wikipedia:A Primer for newcomers

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
• mw:Category:Help about 60 pages.

Notes

• Category:Wikipedia articles that are too technical a couple of syntax type help files included, but mostly articles.
• User:ClueBot II/sandbox.js contains the text that is displayed and lists the pages served - this bot clears most of the help sandboxes and tutorial etc.

Templates

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

There is also a simple talk page header intended for initially used help pages.. Template:Talkpage of help.

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

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

Template for help categories {{Help category}}

This category contains pages in the help namespace and help pages in the project namespace. It should not be used to categorise articles or pages in other namespaces.

Barn stars

'The Helping Hand Barnstar' is to be awarded to editors who frequently help new users. Template:The Helping Hand Barnstar

		The Helping Hand Barnstar
		Reason for award

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)
18. ukexpat  – 19:20, 2 February 2010 (UTC). I guess I should have added myself sooner...
19. Jim.henderson (talk) 13:00, 1 September 2010 (UTC) Amazing that this area is so neglected
20. Dodoïste (talk) 17:38, 12 September 2010 (UTC) I want to suggest improvements of help pages structure, navigation menus, breadcrumb, and much more. In collaboration with the usability project.
21. leahtwosaints Help with ploading photos via Creative Commons, and biography projects in particular. --Leahtwosaints (talk) 10:22, 7 November 2010 (UTC)
22. AshLin (talk) 05:17, 25 April 2011 (UTC)