User:Yunshui/Don't be too keen to help

If you don't know how to ride a bike yourself, it's probably a bad idea to try and teach someone else...

Wikipedia has a number of venues where new users can receive assistance. There's the Teahouse to which many users receive an invitation in their first few days of editing. There's the Help desk, where people can ask questions about using and editing Wikipedia. There's the Village pump, where discussions of new ideas take place, and where new (and experienced) users can get technical assistance. There's also the {{help me}} template which can be posted on one's userpage to get aid with a specific problem. In other words, there are lots of ways to ask for help on Wikipedia.

Many new users get their first interaction with the Wikipedia community in one of these venues. Usually this is as a petitioner asking for help; however, quite often new or fairly inexperienced users can be found giving advice, especially at the Teahouse. This is not always a good idea, since the result will usually go one of two ways:

You don't know what you're talking about

Giving bad advice on one of the help forums is substantially worse than giving no advice at all. Left to their own devices, there's a good chance that new users may stumble across the appropriate policies and guidelines on their own, thus answering their own question. If they ask a question at the Teahouse, though, they're liable to assume that any answer they get is the correct one - and why wouldn't they? This means that they'll take the bad advice as gospel, and stop looking into the issue themselves. If you're a relatively new user, the chances are that what you think is the correct way to do something is not the correct way, or at least isn't the best way. By jumping on a question about, say, a user's declined sandbox draft and replying, "It looks great! No problems there! Here's how you move it into mainspace..." you are actively making things worse for the user (who, on receiving your advice, will move their article to mainspace - and then watch, possibly crying, as it's tagged for deletion and removed altogether). Don't give advice unless you are absolutely sure it is correct.

You know too much about what you're talking about

But let's say you're one of the few users who's actually done the required reading before starting out on Wikipedia. You've lurked, without making any edits, for a few months, familiarising yourself with how the place works, with the arcanery of WikiMarkup and with the various policies and guidelines. One day, you see someone asking how to do something fairly complex with table syntax at one of the help venues. Since you know where to find Help:Table and you're reasonably bright, you have a quick read of the examples there and then go back and explain to the user how to make a sortable, fixed-width, nested table. Helpful, right? It is to the new user, but it's not going to win you any friends. Whilst Wikipedia editors try to assume good faith, what you've just done actually looks very suspicious. Most users don't understand table syntax until they've been around the Wikipedia block a few times, so effectively, you've just advertised that you know a lot more about Wikipedia than a new account should. In the eyes of most editors, there's therefore a strong possibility that you've had an account before, and are either evading a block or operating multiple accounts. Neither of these is going to go down particularly well, since both are pretty endemic problems here; you can expect some pretty hard grilling as a result. Even if you're exonerated, it's likely that your one helpful act will have generated reams of discussion, ill-will and suspicion among the Wikipedia community, which ultimately makes the place worse, and therefore isn't helpful.

If you're a new user, helping others in the same boat seems like a nice thing to do. At the end of the day, though, it's unlikely to make things better for you or for the project. Leave it to others to lend a helping hand until you've been around a while and done some good work on the encyclopedia; then you'll a) know what you're talking about and b) be expected to know what you're talking about.