HelpIndex

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Revision as of 02:18, 8 March 2008 by 198.36.178.141 (talk) (→‎Tasks: fix typo)



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Moving namespaces

Ran across a good potential use for Namespaces. I want to see if HelpIndex links to the pages pointed to by Six messaging areas. Some of those pages are linked to by a huge list of stuff. The What links here pages allow me to limit the list to a particular Namespace. Unfortunately, HelpIndex seems to be in the main Namespace. Would it make sense to move it to the Help namespace so we could more easily see if HelpIndex linked to various pages? What would be the side effects of this move? -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 20:09, 10 February 2008 (PST)

Yes, I have seen that benefit as well. I think it's fine to move it. Help:HelpIndex or Help:Index? The potentially hardest part of that will be checking backlinks for double-redirects, but maybe since HelpIndex is new, there aren't too many redirects to it yet.
I do suggestion moving this part about the re-naming to HelpIndex before we do it. TedErnst (talk) 05:58, 11 February 2008 (PST)
  1. Re your question where to move it: Help:HelpIndex or Help:Index? The second is simpler. I like simple but don't have a strong preference. Does one of these work better than the other? Note that because of how Find functions, you must type "Help:Index" into the Find box to have Help:Index returned as a search result. So we must keep HelpIndex (for among other reasons) so that users searching for "Help Index" and the like would generate a hit.
  2. "What links here" says there are 50 pages that link to HelpIndex. This is a manageable number for checking backlinks for double-redirects. And even 50 appears to be an exaggeration; it appears that many of these pages link to HelpIndex only because they include the CommunityNews template.

-- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 07:43, 11 February 2008 (PST)

Joe, I have never been a big fan of namespaces, as Ted knows :-) - I am usually more interested in flattening out the wiki than making it more complicated. What benefit do you see about using the namespace, I see you mentinon What links here - but am still confused. Best, MarkDilley

Mark: What I see isn't a huge benefit; there are workarounds; and I don't know enough about the workings of Namespaces to have an opinion on the tradeoffs. Anyhow, here's what I had in mind as a benefit:
I stumble across (or someone sends me to) a page that includes some kind of help. Is that page already included in HelpIndex? An intuitively easy way to answer this is to look at What links here. But What links here may return a really long list of pages -- in an order that I don't yet understand -- partly because it defaults to listing pages from all Namespaces. If HelpIndex were outside the Main Namespace (e.g., in the Help Namespace), I could display What links here from only the Help Namespace, and tell more quickly if the page was linked to by HelpIndex. That's all I had in mind. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 11:19, 11 February 2008 (PST)

Tasks

  • fix interwiki links ASAP: most wikipedia links should be to meta
  • Add all entries from AboutUs Help
    • Turn into links, duplicating under different headings as appropriate
    • "Formatting" heading
  • Review AboutUs:Basic wiki formatting and add headings
  • Review WikiTour and add headings
  • Review Help and add headings
  • Comments
  • Add Link Spam to Links
  • f ix Alert links to point to EmailAlerts
  • Report a bug, report a concern
  • Review Glossary, add entries as appropriate
  • Here's another list to go through and make sure it's all represented here. Six messaging areas; Done
  • Review site navigation toolbar, and make sure represented here.
    • also would be nice to figure out a place to make recommendations on better site navigation. Right here is fine
  • Review Glossary, point out Glossary items for which help is available elsewhere or that I don't understand. Those entries will be listed at User_talk:JDCohen#Glossary. Now complete through M.
  • Review Special pages to see if appropriate ones are in this index and have help pages.
  • More formatting
    • break line
    • horizontal line (I'm having trouble finding this)
    • paragraphs
    • formulas
    • advanced / css
  • Review http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Html metawikipedia:Help:HTML_in_wikitext (this literally could mean going through all the metawikipedia help pages one by one and seeing what could be linked to or needs to be brought to AboutUs). List of all pages in the metawikipedia Help Namespace is at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:Allpages?from=&namespace=12
  • Review AboutUs FAQs, add entries as appropriate
  • Review AboutUs help categories, add entries as appropriate
  • Review Category:AboutUs:Templates
  • Review wikipedia:Help:Contents#For_editors
    • Add entries as appropriate, with multiple headings, if appropriate
  • Where duplicate headings link to different pages, consider eliminating an entry
  • Sectional links for longer pages, like AboutUs:Basic wiki formatting WikiTour
  • The following are ideas on formatting / appearance of this HelpIndex
    • in source text for this section, change <strike> to css
    • perhaps create template to be used for links to (metawikipedia)
    • Category-style alpha TOC; perhaps best if this could float; but floating is probably incompatible with multiple columns because the index would cover up part of the right-hand column(s). See next bullet point.
    • turn the index into multi-columns (takes less time to find right place). But probably incompatible with floating index.
    • add entry for metawikipedia help
      • add very short note above or below HelpIndex explaining metawikipedia, MediaWiki.
  • Consider replacing duplicate links (different entries that link to same place) with cross references to the same entry, so that there's only one link. (Makes it easier to link to a different place -- only need to change one link.)
  • In the future, the help pages with multiple topics (BasicWikiFormatting) can be broken up so permalinks can work for the sub-sections - and transcluded back together so BasicWikiFormatting still works.
  • Category:AboutUs_Help - are pages in this category represented in HelpIndex??
  • Are all pages pointed to by HelpIndex in Category:AboutUs_Help?
  • Ted will invite AboutUs Welcomer | welcomers and RecentChanges patrol and community staff to review this page in detail with an eye towards filling any gaps and/or finding duplication
  • Fix the image help help:images duplication

Idea

Self-assembling help index

  • Would the following scheme work?
    • Move all Help pages to a special Namespace (e.g., the Help Namespace)
    • Now the Help index is simply a (specialized) list of all pages in that namespace. The index is specialized in that it would:
      • at a minimum, strip the name of the namespace from each entry. For instance, the index entry for the page named "Help:Bold" would appear in the index as "Bold"
      • could also add additional formatting. For instance the index could have formatting like a category page, with entries organized under a letter of the alphabet, put in columns, an alphabetical index appearing at the top of the page.
    • Note that in this scheme, you create additional index entries that link to an existing help page is simply to create a redirect page. For instance, if there's a page named (and indexed under) "Bold", and you also want an index entry for "Formatting, bold" that points to that page, you create a new page -- in the Help Namespace -- titled "Formatting, bold" which simply redirects to Bold.
    • Cross-reference index entries work the same way (they are just redirects).
    • Entries that point to sections of pages work the same way (they are just redirects).
  • Advantages of this scheme
    • It is automatically complete. I.e., there is at least one index entry per help page. I think this is big deal:
      • Manually trying to figure out whether the index is complete takes forever, and isn't guaranteed to work.
      • It's automatic. There's one less step to complete (or forget to complete) when someone adds (or deletes) a new help page.
    • Adds more organization to help pages. Makes them easier to find. So it would be easier to eliminate or redirect the many pages that are duplicates, empty, or whose substance is covered more completely elsewhere.
    • Could benefit the larger wiki community if the scheme is transportable to other wikis.
  • Disadvantages of this scheme
    • It takes some development effort. But as it ends up looking much like a Category page, I suspect it's not hard to develop.
    • I don't know if I can redirect off-site. This is a big deal.
    • The source that creates the entries cannot be edited in one place. In the hand-built index, I can see the source text for the entire index just by editing the HelpIndex page. In the self-generating index, the source is distributed over many pages - one page per entry.
    • Harder to fix typos? You would have to re-name a page.
    • Theoretically raises the bar to community participation. In the current hand-built index, you can create a new entry with knowledge only of basic editing and wiki formatting. The scheme would require knowledge about Namespaces and Redirects, which requires deeper knowledge of MediaWiki. But, this problem could be ameliorated by appropriate help pages (e.g., how to add a new entry to the help index). Also, I don't know how significant this problem is; how many casual users will try to modify the Help Index. If none or few, we can live with this disadvantage. (We can get a feel for this by seeing who is modifying the current hand-built index.)
    • Cannot create custom entries, may lose some information that's currently built in by hand. For instance, where the entry points off-site, I currently add something like "(metawikipedia)". This would disappear. I don't know if there's a work-around. And in the hand-built index, entry text in the form [url] would appear in the hand-built index with a dashed underline. But that information would disappear in the self-assembling version as the entry would point to a page in AboutUs (which re-directs off site).

Discussion

Wow, Joe. Lots to think about here. I have a couple of thoughts right off, and then I'll come back and be more thorough. TedErnst (talk) 08:42, 24 January 2008 (PST)

  • We've struggled with the idea of the help namespace because we don't know what goes in it. Maybe this doesn't matter? For example, Bold could redirect to Help:Bold and we get the best of both worlds. I'm not sure.
    • Response -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 17:36, 24 January 2008 (PST)
      1. I don't think namespaces generally should matter to site users. And I don't see any problem in the kind of re-direct you mention. But namespaces could have an administrative use that's invisible to most users. Under the proposed scheme the namespace matters only to people who create help pages.
      2. My larger goal is a help index that assembles automatically (or semi-automatically). Maybe there's a better way to do it. My knowledge of the inner workings of MediaWiki is rudimentary. Maybe someone more knowledgable can propose an alternate scheme.
  • I'm not sure the automated way using the help namespace actually does save a step, because someone still has to know to put the new article in the help namespace. If they mis-name, it's lost, just as in the situation where someone forgets to add a new page to the hand-generated HelpIndex.
    • Good point that a help page after implementation of this scheme can still get lost if it's created in the wrong namespace. But -- if it's in the right namespace -- then creation of the help page and an index entry is one step. In contrast, creating a hep page and an index entry under the current scheme is always two separate steps. -- Joe Cohen | Leave me a message 17:36, 24 January 2008 (PST)
  • I've thought more about the issue of bold having it's own page, by the way, and am coming more and more to the conclusion that it does, even if it also lives on the BasicWikiFormatting page. See watch and my watchlist for examples. These aren't quite right yet, but maybe it shows the idea I have? This is seperate from your automated idea, but might make things easier in any event. We'd no longer need to use anchors in the manual list, and if we decided to do the automated one, we'd be forced into this scheme anyway, I think. I do like the idea of redirecting for cross-references. We could actually start doing that now. One problem with this is that double-redirects don't work, so if the destination of the redirect moves, we'll have to manually fix all re-directing pages, which is always true.


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