User:Stephen Gilbert/Documentation survey

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...

Entry points

• 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...

Need updating, editing or expansion

• 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

Obsolete and/or redundant

Many of these are historically interesting and should be archived

• Wikipedia:Chat
  • now redirects to Wikipedia:Village pump - I didn't archive, because I'm lazy Martin
    • Content and history now at Wikipedia:Historical archive/Wikipedia chat - the page itself redirects to Wikipedia:IRC channels now. Graham87 01:59, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Wiki Supreme Court
• Wikipedia:Non-English Wikipedias/Text To Translate
• Wikipedia:Article a day queue
  • now redirects to wikipedia:brilliant prose - didn't look historically interesting to me Martin
    • I've undone the redirect and added {{Historical}} to it. Graham87 01:59, 7 February 2009 (UTC)
• Wikipedia:Why Aren't These Pages Copyedited
• Wikipedia:Wikipedia NEWS
• Wikipedia:Building Wikipedia membership
• Wikipedia:Canonization
• Wikipedia:Disruption
• Wikipedia:French php translation page
• Wikipedia:GFDL History (unofficial)
  • I think User:The Cunctator started this one. I'll ask him about it...
• Wikipedia:Handling edit conflicts
  • Material should be merged with Wikipedia:Edit conflicts
  • is now redirected - merge will take a little longer Martin
• Wikipedia:How do I do this
  • Being merged with other FAQs; almost finished

Phase II related

• Wikipedia:Votes for article-of-the-day
• Wikipedia:Votes for NPOVing
• Wikipedia:Votes for wikification

Nupedia stuff

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

Pages I think are particularly good

• Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Wikipedia:How does one edit a page
  • Needs some slight updating, e.g. embeding images in text.
• Wikipedia:How to reduce colors for saving a JPEG as PNG

Documentation we need but lack

• 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

Wouldn't it be nice...

• Wikipedia:Guide for Everything2 Noders
  • started by User:Damian Yerrick
• Wikipedia:Guide for H2G2 Researchers
  • I'll try this... Martin