Wikipedia:Help Project

Welcome to the Wikipedia Help Project!

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

The trouble with help pages

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

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

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

Open tasks

List of subpages

Redesign our tutorial so people will read through it.
~~Improve the Welcome template to encourage people to click links that will guide New Editors to the best help resources.~~

~~Identify areas of the help system that are in need of some attention.~~
Improve navigation between help pages by:
- Developing nav templates in /Overview, with the possibility of using them on the help pages to aid users, too.
- Navbox - Wikipedia:Help Project/Overview/Accessible Nav Box.
- New template that could be useful: {{Breadcrumb2}}.
Cleanup Category:Wikipedia help and sub-categories.

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

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 ==~~

10 May 2014 - Page statistics were updated. Interestingly Wikipedia:Your first article now appears to be the second most visited page on Wikipedia (after the Main Page).
Older news...

Page alerts

No Article alerts at this time.

Assessment

Bird's-eye view

To survey Wikipedia's huge collection of help pages, try the following pages:

Help:Menu
- Help:Menu/Site map – all the browse pages presented on a single page
Help:Contents/Directory
Wikipedia:Editor's index to Wikipedia – includes operational pages
Wikipedia:List of shortcuts#General information, help, and tutorials
All pages index

Note that Wikipedia:Department directory lists Wikipedia's operational (task-oriented) pages, but itself could be considered a help page.

Pages needing work

Pages requiring some work or further thought listed on this page (which also lists completed missions).

Relevant Wikipedia project pages

Category:Wikipedia information pages and Category:Wikipedia how-to are the main subcategories listing help pages.
Wikipedia:Help desk (interactive) for questions about how to use or edit Wikipedia.
Wikipedia:Teahouse (interactive) helps new editors become accustomed to community culture, ask questions, and develop community relationships.
Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia parent article on how and where editors can contribute to Wikipedia.
Help:Getting started links to the basics needed to use, comment on, and contribute to Wikipedia.
Help:Wikipedia: The Missing Manual is a whole help guide.
Wikipedia:A Primer for newcomers explains editing and policy basics.
Wikipedia:Article wizard helps to guide editors creating their first article.
Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Adventure is an interactive tutorial for new editors.
Wikipedia:Annotated article illustrates the different sections of an article.
Wikipedia:Workshop's Sample one day workshop presents an outline for workshop leaders that also is a guide for new users.

Wikipedia:Tips is the complete library of tips arranged by subject.
Wikipedia:Tip of the day project develops and maintains the tip of the day templates which are displayed throughout Wikipedia.
Wikipedia:Article Feedback Tool/Tutorial is a page linked to some articles encouraging readers to edit.

Related WikiProjects

WikiProject Editor Retention – devising ways of keeping good editors here (new and old).
WikiProject Manual of Style – coordinating pages which form the Manual of Style guidelines: reducing size, increasing readability and consistency.
WikiProject Policy and Guidelines – one of their main goals is making policy and guideline pages easier to understand.
WikiProject Usability – aims to make Wikipedia easy and pleasant to use, focussing on accessibility for all potential users, interface etc.

Other resources

Instructions for creating help contents from the WMF's Growth project

This is a WikiProject, an area for focused collaboration among Wikipedians. New participants are welcome; please feel free to participate!