Project news summary

• The in-person usability tests from the wub's community fellowship have been written up.
• Three new introductory tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia.
• The Article Feedback Tool has been deployed to pages in the Help namespace, and can be added manually to help pages in other namespaces. Read more...
• Page statistics were updated for the month of August.

From the editor

Hi, and welcome to the fourth issue of the Help Project newsletter.

It's been another busy month in the world of Wikipedia help. The results from the in-person usability tests conducted as part of the help pages fellowship have been released. There are no great surprises here, the tests confirmed that people have trouble with the existing help system, and people looking for help on the same topic often end up at wildly different pages. Editors who experienced a tutorial and/or edited a sandbox as part of their learning were noticeably more confident when editing a real article.

Drawing on that, three new "Introduction to" tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. These join the popular existing introductions to policies and guidelines and talk pages. Feel free to edit them, but please do remember that the idea is to keep them simple and as free from extraneous details as possible. All three have been added to Help:Getting started, which is intended to be the new focal point for new editors, and will also be seeing a redesign soon.

In other news, the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) can now be used to collect feedback on help pages. By default it has been deployed to all pages in the Help: namespace. It can be disabled on any page by adding Category:Article Feedback Blacklist, or enabled for pages in other namespaces by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. Once a page has AFT applied, you can add feedback using the form which appears at the bottom of it. Feedback can be reviewed by clicking "View feedback" in the sidebar, or the "Feedback from my watched pages" link at the top of your watchlist.

I'm now entering the final month of my fellowship, and will be focusing my efforts on making much needed improvements to Help:Contents, the main entrance point to our help system. It's been a pleasure working as a fellow, and I just want to thank all the people who have helped me or offered advice over the past months. That definitely won't be the end of my involvement in the Help Project though, I'll be sticking around as a volunteer and continuing to write this newsletter.

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

-- the wub "?!" 20:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC) reply

Project news summary

• Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Contact us have seen a major revamp.
• Page statistics were updated.
• Alerts are now available for discussions related to Help Project pages
• Many more Help Project pages now have the Article Feedback Tool (v5) enabled.
• GettingStarted is an experimental feature to guide new users with their first edits.

From the editor

Hello again from the Help Project!

In the last newsletter (which was quite a while ago sorry!) I talked about my fellowship and the plans for improving the main portal page, Help:Contents. Well I'm sad to say that my fellowship is now over, but very happy to say that the proposed improvements to that page have been completed and implemented. Do check it out if you haven't already.

Another important and frequently used help page, Wikipedia:Contact us, has also seen a significant revamp. You may recognise the design inspiration from the new tutorial pages.

In project news, we now have a subscription to the "article alerts" service. Any deletion nominations, move discussions, or requests for comments on pages within the Help Project's scope will now show up at Wikipedia:Help Project/Article alerts. So that's definitely a page which project members might want to watch.

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

-- the wub "?!" 23:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC) reply

Issue VI - April 2013

Open Help Conference

The Open Help Conference will be taking place June 15-19 in Cincinnati Ohio, USA. The conference includes two days of presentations and open discussions, followed by team "sprints" - collaborative efforts to write and improve documentation.

It has been suggested to send a team from Wikipedia/Wikimedia: to share our own knowledge about help, learn from others in the open source community working on similar problems, and to carry out a sprint to improve some aspect of Wikipedia's help.

There may be support available for volunteers to attend from the Participation Support program (and your editor is certainly hoping to be there!) Please join the discussion in Meta's IdeaLab if you're interested, and/or have suggestions about what we could work on.

Other news

• The Article Feedback Tool (v5) has now been changed to be opt-in for all pages. It can be enabled for specific pages by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 to them. There are also a number of new features.
• It has been proposed to merge the questions forum of the New contributors' help page into the Teahouse. Discussion is taking place here.
• The help menu at Help:Contents/Browse and its subpages have been largely cleaned up.
• User:Moxy has created a descriptive help directory.
• A project on Video and Interactive Tutorials has begun, supported by a Wikimedia Foundation grant. Suggestions for subjects are invited on the talk page.

If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

Suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter.

the wub "?!" 16:22, 25 April 2013 (UTC) reply