This user subpage is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. If you want to revive discussion regarding the subject, you might try contacting the user in question or seeking broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

This was my personal survey of Wikipedia's user and contributor documentation in early 2003. This is of historical interest only.

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. Graham 87 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. Graham 87 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