View source for User:Stephen Gilbert/Documentation survey

{{historical}}

''This was my personal survey of Wikipedia's user and contributor documentation in early 2003. This is of historical interest only.''
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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]]
**<s>Serves as a documentation portal, but shouldn't.</s>
**<s>Links to [[Wikipedia:Help]], [[Wikipedia:FAQ]], [[Wikipedia:Mailing lists]] and [[Wikipedia:Announcements]] should be enough.</s>
***The above no longer applies. The redesigned front page is ''much'' better.

*[[Wikipedia:About]]
**<s>Pretty bad; just a shotgun blast of links from the front page. We need a short introduction and a few relevant links.</s>
*** 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 [[User:MyRedDice|Martin]]
*** Content and history now at [[Wikipedia:Historical archive/Wikipedia chat]] - the page itself redirects to [[Wikipedia:IRC channels]] now. '''[[User:Graham87|Graham]]'''[[User talk:Graham87|<span style="color:green;">87</span>]] 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 [[User:MyRedDice|Martin]]
***I've undone the redirect and added {{tlx|Historical}} to it. '''[[User:Graham87|Graham]]'''[[User talk:Graham87|<span style="color:green;">87</span>]] 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 [[User:MyRedDice|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... [[User:MyRedDice|Martin]]