User:Cpiral/sandbox/Page fork
Page fork
[edit]I nominate we move WP:copy-paste the page to Wikipedia:Searching (with attributions), and delete the redirect from the new, Project version to the Help version.
Special:WhatLinksHere says about redirects that 22 go to Help:Searching. That's it.
(No redirects to WP:Search or WP:Searching.) There's no move protection template. — CpiralCpiral 05:40, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
- Please see comments above. I think that such a move could be very controversial; it would be best to do an RfC or RM and get people's opinions first. LittleBen (talk) 06:46, 25 April 2013 (UTC)
Rationale
[edit]Relevant past discussions:
Style. MOS is Project space (despite the misleading psuedo-namespace "MOS"). Each Wikimedia project has Help pages for MediaWiki usage pertaining to the Main purpose of that wiki. Then there are their Project pages. The general idea of style is covered MediaWiki page themes (layout, skin, etc) and Help space pages pertain to that. The actual content of the Main pages needs a MoS, which is a Project page specifically covering the verbiage and the variations in language. See Style (sociolinguistics) to understand the importance of how a social group's meanings are attributed. This includes terminology, and the level of their abstractions wielded on a page. If it's interpretable it can be edited. The interpretation of texts from a linguistic perspective is presented in Stylistics. If the help an audience needs is vast, and if the audience is vast, we obviously need a page fork to encourage editing. Rather than making section 0 easy, section 1 mediocre... section 8 impossible, why not create a consistent audience style where possible? Which author needs the additional gradient (the geek gradient) beyond the required one in MOS:INTRO? A Help page is like one official spokesperson consisting of all the editors of the page, and if the speech is long, it better be interesting.
Help:Search has languished in the dust for a very long time, as have many important Help pages. Not so much Project pages (e.g. Page name). Why? For example, a forked WP:Searching would have many more advanced search-box queries examples, and advancing editors that were eager and willing to record the interesting ones as they go. Per the multiple drafts model, the worded aspects of things derive from the eagerness that would affect those words. Q. How are we gonna get advancing editors to edit Help:Search? A. WP:Copy-paste a version to the Project namespace. Let the already advanced editors give back by contributing to the "front door" that Help pages are. Then, like the furiously atrocious exposition of computing-related articles (that test notability and WP:NOT constantly), they will be edited a lot. We could have two sections "Search examples" and "Advanced search examples", but perhaps the advanced one would need an introduction, etc. Certainly the section "Search results page" could go into much more detail about "refining results", "user preferences" the redirects, and even the Wikipedia search engine future, or comparisons with general web search engines.
Motivation. In general the wisdom of multiple purposed activities means good copy editors like to learn as they edit. At once they learn and share what to them is comprehended, but needs improvement. Advanced topics become more clear on the page, once they are multiply drafted. Editor conflict might induce the creation of multiple drafts from a few authors, but so does activity that is peaceful enough to invite many authors. Peace is intrinsic to being OK with the conceptual levels, and this might means two versions of the same subject. New users are more likely to hesitate to edit.
The future. Help pages might become a Simple Wikipedia, like our Help:contents and Help:Introduction to navigating Wikipedia/3: gems wrapped in plenty of tables, templates, and CSS silk. In general, I have read that Wikipedia pages tend to mediocrity. I guess watchers of Help pages tend to be editors of Help pages, and these editors tend to advance into Project space, so can rarely be counted on to be vigilant Help watchers for many years. This is not so for the MoS (and some other Project pages), where goodness is more prevalent because there is usually someone guarding the sacrament by undoing a naive edit in reference to a past discussion.
To find out empirically the nature of our dichotomy, perhaps look for historical patterns. That is the intent of the two-column hypertext list that follows this paragraph. Now for (admittedly biased) patterns and clues as to the nature of our dichotomy between Help and Project namespaces:
- A redirect from Help to Project might be trying to tell us something if it is very old and very WhatLinksHere-ish.
- If a pagename that has a Help version and has a redirect from its WP version did evolve from its Help version and maybe it wants to evolve. The redirection, Help-->Project might want to evolve and the direction P-->H, might be encouraging more readership to evolve. These might directions might be suggestive. (See below how they might only be the need to have the word "Wikipedia" in the title, which is silly, and definitely worth discussion.)
- Other Wikimedia installations are ridden with our clues as to "What is Wikipedia's Project namespace?" There is mw:Help:Contents#Wiki administration, which is a very good clue for deciding when and if to fork Help pages, as it clearly delineates my audience question. The answer to what vexes us is, I believe, that we want readers who're commensurate with editors. (The other prefixes for Help:Contents are listed at Help:Interwiki_linking#Project_titles_and_shortcuts. To get a list of namespaces there, click a null search, then click advanced.)
- Our Project space is MediaWiki's Manual namespace. Mw:Help:Contents act as "the front door to wiki user", i.e. for "any new user", but the way they describe there Manual namespace is: "All technical or more detailed stuff behind the surface, that is not part of the basic help pages. MW:Manual:Contents says "This is a technical manual for the MediaWiki software", and it says "not for end users'" Help pages. The MediaWiki wiki says there mainspace is for pages "all about the software". (See mw:Project:Namespaces. To extend this argument, one might see the other prefixes for Project:Namespaces, listed at Help:Interwiki_linking#Project_titles_and_shortcuts.)
Their appears some obvious conclusions in the analysis below the list. I still believe Searching is a prime candidate two versions, for the same basic reason Links and Tables were. (Namespace's move should have not been merged back.) I make the effort to generalize for the sake The Wub, and PrimeHunter, and for other discussions. — CpiralCpiral 03:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC)
Researched material for discussion
[edit]MediaWiki releases comes with 28, stock namespaces including Help and Project. Per WikiMedia project Public Domain Help pages The idea is to provide a set of pages which can be copied into a fresh wiki installation, or included in the mediawiki distribution. This will include basic user information and other Meta information, in a reasonably concise form. The basic concept is to create a compressed user guide, not a reference work. It should focus on what users want and not explain other functions. The key here is that Help do not explain much. They say "The help pages are very much targeted at normal visitors to a wiki website." I think Help pages "describe" MediaWiki software plus the minimumm wiki basics, and that forked versions of Help pages (into Project pages, other Help pages, etc) do explain, and in great detail and advance detail and technical detail what is given as the skeletal nodes in the meager description Help pages are to WikiMedia, and were once to Wikipedia.
As an analogy the Help pages of some wiki called "Wikisport" would be the MediaWiki help pages, plus they would add Help pages telling what sports are, the equipment, the players, the rules, like what a pool is, and what a diver does. Their added Help pages would teach, in low-level abstraction, about sports. Project pages like Wikisport:Olympic diving wouldn't exist in a Help version, but themselves might eventually, comprehensively cover the chemistry and physics and engineering of an Olympic pool and the triple back-flip in great detail so that the authors in mainspace could report notable sporting events, in the project's best possible style. Style would be things like advanced terminology, expected level of articulation of background information for the setting and players of an event page, how to categorize there article, etc. A Help level apprentice could start a page, and a Project level level editor could make it featured. To ascertain the target readership of a Help page in general for a wiki, please see mw:Project:PD_help#Target_readership_-_Normal_users, where it says that "[certain] information is to be kept a little bit separate, so that normal users are not confronted with information which is not relevant to them", namely that administrative information is not for visiting editors, like the IP that is largely sanctioned here.
Wikipedia is so vast that Help:Searching and Help:Navigating are, like categorizing, worthy of many levels. Search is worth explaining in great detail: the engine, the results, the refinement, other search engines that can search Wikipedia, query expressions of search engines, etc., etc.. Comparably, navigating to a page is relatively limited, and might not need to be forked into a Project page, but perhaps navigating category pages could be a Project page, but it's covered in Help:categories. If the previous paragraph and its linked reference is to be taken to heart, then our Help pages should not even mention Namespaces, because normal users are visiting IP's, editing articles, linking articles but not categorizing them. But they ship with Help:Namespaces, and we redirect it to Project:Namespaces because why? Visiting IP's are not going to categorize when they edit?
The original page names of the help files are on the left. Select added titles is starred. Most of them are discovered titles that have both a Help and a Project version. Done means forked. Redirects are shown with a directional arrow for consideration and discussion.
Help:Bots WP:Bots Help:Category * WP:CategorizationDone Help:Categories ↑ Help:Contents WP:Contents
Help:Editing pages <-- WP:Editing pages Help:Formatting WP:Formatting Help:Images WP:Images
Note:
- Entries marked with * were added to the original list from MediaWiki: Page name and Shortcut.
- Entries marked "done" were forked here. Some of the already "done" ones are probably yet missing from the list.
- Lines with neither * nor "done" are the same article (via redirect), and the mid-arrow shows the direction.
- Entries marked with a are in what I think is a similar purview: basic Help V. advanced Project versions.
Notable facts about how Wikipedia "Help V. Project" has played out so far:
- The original Help:categories morphed into two Help pages: the original Help:Categories remained very basic, Help:Category isn't. The project version WP:Categorization is highly abstract (of course because its steering an "all knowledge" project.) Categorization was a simple rename of a Help page forked to Project space.
- Help:Template is far more advanced than WP:template. I guess "doing" templates is "helps" by explaining how-to, and "Wikipedia" templates is just a basic "hello" from Wikipedia. Again it's a title attribute, more than a namespace attribute.
- Help:tables evolved thusly: Help:Wikitable and Help:Table/Introduction to tables; WP:Tables (plural) disambiguates between the three.
- WP:links, WP:Tables were supervened by the MoS. Tables as a dab page (mnemonic multiple ) no doubt, so they could then have Help:Table.
- Ironically, Random page has a Help version that redirects to Project space, and a Project version that redirects to Help space!
- There is no Help:Bots. Is it too technical for Help?
- Help:Category is considerably more technical than some Project help pages. This implies that technical levels are not the only namespace criterion. (See next paragraph)
- Blue links on the left sometimes are not really existing as a page, but only as a redirect to new titles in Help, such as was done with Help:Images and Help:Variables. These might be marked as "done", but forking a page from Help to Help is another, un-researched aspect of Help V. Project.
- Variables: both versions now point to a section of the other Help page Magic words.
- Red links on the right are rare. Critically here, they mean we decided not to have that Help page in Project space.
- Range blocks: is technical, but not administrative. Its content is virtually entirely IPv4 CIDR ranging, but that info is used by admins for blocking IP ranges. Although the blocking feature is not available to normal users, it mentions blocking in the first paragraph only.
These are all fine issues for discussions about the state of affairs as they now exist, and how to possibly manage the future evolution, as if there simply was not enough information yet during the discussions that encompassed the decisions back then.
An analysis for discussion. The page name is followed by the apparent reason it was forked (has two versions), as indicated by the "done" mark.
- Red links on the left with a blue link on the right means we moved a page from Help to Project, a critical indicator here. I've indicated a possible reason, but each of these might deserve a discussion.
- Bots: "Wikipedia bots"
- How to delete a page: administrative pages are Project pages
- Editing pages: "Editing Wikipedia pages"
- Formatting: "Formatting Wikipedia pages"
- Merge history: administrative pages are Project pages
- New pages: "New Wikipedia pages"
- Protection policy: administrative pages are Project pages
- Signatures: "Wikipedia signatures"
- Undelete: administrative pages are Project pages
Administrative pages are Project pages loses 5:4 here. It is most remarkable that choice seems to be made based on title attributes of the page in particular, and not on the namespace attributes in general. But that "silliness" of these results of this simple analysis is debatable.
Another analysis could look at redirects, and tally those reasons.
A fuller analysis would start from the two column list of pages from Category:Reader help and Category:Wikipedia help.— CpiralCpiral 03:23, 5 May 2013 (UTC) (updated version)
- Help:Searching is definitely a help page and I see no reason to move it. See Wikipedia:Namespace#Basic namespaces for the difference between help pages and project pages. Sometimes there is reason to have a page in both namespaces. For example, Help:Redirect explains how redirects work while Wikipedia:Redirect is an editing guideline about how to treat redirects in the English Wikipedia. Help:Link explains how links work while Wikipedia:Link redirects to an editing guideline for the English Wikipedia. I don't see how a page about searching could be a guideline or something else that belongs in project space. PrimeHunter (talk) 00:42, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
Import/export
[edit]I want to Special:export Help:Searching, then import it to Wikipedia:Searching. (Only an admin can do it.) Then put a hatnote like on Help:Page name, advising of a more technical version WP:Page name. I've consistently conveyed the idea of forking. I want to fork the content, while maintaining the contribution history. There are history mergers and various administrative templates and special edit summaries to consider.
- I thought surely it was fairly normal, and called it a page move, but my research so far shows it may not in fact be normal, but be an import/export, which is not normally available, like a move or a merge or a copy or a fork is. I glossed over the WT:page name#requested move discussion thinking it was normal to fork/merge/import/export, whatever it is. As I write above, there is a history that supports something like I'm trying to propose, but it isn't a move, its a fork. There is certainly a way.
- I was thinking all the most important help pages need two versions. The five above have two versions. I was also thinking that a geek gradient dooms a Help page, but that geeks spur a Project version of a Help page to thrive. I was thinking Searching and Namespace, like Page name also need a Project and a Help version. I've written above how Categories evolved, and Redirect. I read on WP:Page name#Namespace, pagename, and fullpagename where it makes the very distinction I'm writing about here. All those check marks, plus all the red links are telling us something I'm trying to figure out, with the premise that content forking is done based on the contents of similar-subject/similar-pagename, but different technical level. I'm still researching what to tell PrimeHunter. — CpiralCpiral 06:33, 26 April 2013 (UTC)
- As I said, I am not proposing to make any changes to the body of the article (unless you ask for it)—you are welcome to continue to enhance it with more geek detail—but I think that the intro. would be greatly improved by making it shorter, simpler, and more newbie-friendly (with pics.) as per the draft above. But I'd like to fix the examples in the Note at the end.
- The Help:Searching#Syntax, Help:Searching#Parameters and Help:Searching#Stemming sections of the article seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with Wikipedia search; they are about using Google site: search to search Wikipedia. This material can be used to expand WP:SET, but the same sort of material also appears at Google Search#Search syntax and Google Search#Search options. LittleBen (talk) 16:31, 26 April 2013 (UTC)