Talk:Archive:Community Pages

New user observation

Hi Larry. Something that struck me as I have been educating myself about CZ these recent days has been the absence of a left menu "Help" link in the basic CZ page template. "Support" was the closest but that was not it. When I have wanted to learn something (either editing tips or policy matters) I have needed to hunt them down. I notice a help section mentioned above but thought it worth mentioning that a 'one-click' "Help" as a single line link at left of every page would really (ahem) help. --Ian Johnson 10:11, 27 July 2007 (CDT)

I ran into the same problem. Seems that all editing help- should be accessible from any edit page. I may have missed it, but I couldn't find editing help until I went to the main list of everything. Thomas Mandel 19:01, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

Help vs. policy

Help v policy - I think there are clear instances of help pages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Magic_words would be a good example.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 16:45, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

Right (yes, you can find examples of technical help pages that are strictly technical help), but there is ultimately no clear way to draw the distinction. "Technical instructions" does often blend into policy instructions without any clear line at all. Besides, the word "Help" does not describe technical instructions somehow better than it describes policy and process instructions. In other words, why call technical instructions "help," and not the other things people...need help with? This is just a plain old simplification move. We need to do a lot of simplification... --Larry Sanger 20:38, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

I'm all for creating improved systems, which seems to be the direction of your thinking here. My only main thing is that people (I'd say universally) associate "the feeling of being stuck" with "needing help", so at least in so far as designing things in a user-friendly way (e.g., the link on the left) is concerned, the term ought not be dispensed with altogether.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 21:48, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

That's reasonable. --Larry Sanger 21:57, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

Special:CreatePage

"Have a form that people can click use create a new page: Type title: [_________] {start article}

Just making sure you know that exists: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:CreatePage.

While I am remembering and you are there...it is also WikiHow who uses the plugin (or whatever) to attribute main authors, see for example this and scroll down to the bottom.

 —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 23:18, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

Interesting! So "Special:CreatePage" uses a plugin? --Larry Sanger 10:43, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

I'm not exactly sure, but certainly the code is there and a'working. There is a handful of code snippets I'd like to get from the WikiHow folks, including, while you are looking at that page, the one that adds "To add this image to your article, simply copy and paste the following line into the ideal spot in your article: [[Image:Wikihow1_709.jpg|thumb|description]]." I could start dialog with them, if you like.  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 14:28, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

"If you would like a free copy of our Mediawiki modifications, just ask."  —Stephen Ewen (Talk) 17:50, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

Help!

If you can see what I'm doing here (it shouldn't be too hard to figure out), please help me! --Larry Sanger 11:39, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

Here's how you could help: you could go through the templates listed here and add the most important pages of each type to the templates. Format example: link1 = CZ:Communcation

You could also help by going through the rest of the community pages and ensuring that they're tagged with the correct template. --Larry Sanger 20:33, 4 September 2007 (CDT)