User:Stephen Gilbert/Documentation survey: Difference between revisions

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Revision as of 19:40, 2 September 2013

NOTE: This was my personal survey of Wikipedia's user and contributor documentation in early 2003. This is of historical interest only.

Just a personal survey of our current documentation. Jump in if you like...

Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers
- Essentially the same text that Larry wrote a long time ago, but it's aged well. Needs a little more refactoring, esp. the links at the bottom.

Wikipedia:Help
- Pretty good layout; not too overwhelming for a newcomer. Linked pages need updating.

Wikipedia:FAQ
- Not bad, if I do say so myself. ;-) More re-organizing and migration of old material is needed, esp. with Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.

Wikipedia:Utilities
- Large and sprawling; difficult to navigate. Not really intended for beginners; should be turned into a complete documentation index, leave Help to be the more user friendly document.

Main Page
- ~~Serves as a documentation portal, but shouldn't.~~
- ~~Links to Wikipedia:Help, Wikipedia:FAQ, Wikipedia:Mailing lists and Wikipedia:Announcements should be enough.~~
  - The above no longer applies. The redesigned front page is much better.

Wikipedia:About
- ~~Pretty bad; just a shotgun blast of links from the front page. We need a short introduction and a few relevant links.~~
  - This is also much better now...

Wikipedia:Intlwiki-L -- should probablybe redirected to Wikipedia:Mailing lists
Wikipedia:What Google likes
Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
- ...and also Wikipedia:How to add content to Wikipedia with minimal effort. Maybe these two should be merged.
Wikipedia:Dealing with vandalism
Wikipedia:Edit conflicts
Wikipedia:Friends of Wikipedia
- This is Larry's old project. He looked at all the refering URLs in the logs and tried to keep track of them all. This page should be more selective; it needs heavy pruning.
Wikipedia:How to be neutral when taking sides
- A good page, but needs editing to be a little less personal (use of first person, etc).
Wikipedia:How to explore Wikipedia

Many of these are historically interesting and should be archived

The vaguelly current stuff has been put in Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia, the historical stuff has been moved to meta

A complete beginner's tutorial
Detailed and up-to-date software user's guide
- all user interface links explained
- Preferences
  - Ah, there's Wikipedia:User preferences help! I didn't know that.
Software developer's guide
- good start at m:How to become a Wikipedia hacker

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+'''NOTE:''' ''This was my personal survey of Wikipedia's user and contributor documentation in early 2003. This is of historical interest only.''
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 Just a personal survey of our current documentation. Jump in if you like...