Help:MediaWiki help policy

This page lists possible solutions for Content Atomization, Internationalization, Portability, and Style issues pertaining to the MediaWiki software help.

Content atomization

As topics are intertwined with other aspects of the WikiMedia organization, we have the intention to format this help content in a way that is easily imported into other wiki sites. We are experimenting with namespaces, categories, and templates to meet our needs. See also handbook project

Wikimedia

The help namespace is reserved for the MediaWiki software Help. Please avoid writing content that is specific only to Wikimedia in the MediaWiki help. If you have content about wikimedia, go to the m:Main Page and find the correct page to build off of.

Keeping project-specific material separate

The intention is to keep project-specific material separate, i.e., if needed on help pages it is put in templates. Other projects may use corresponding project-specific templates.

If for any template a project does not need such content, an empty template can be created in that project. This avoids a non-existing template to show up as an edit link to the non-existing template page (removing a reference to such a template from the imported help pages would not be practical, it would make updates cumbersome).

Every help page starts with {{hh}} and ends with {{hc}}. Thus these can be used for project-specific material that is the same for all help pages, and e.g. also, using {{PAGENAME}}, for a link to the master page on Meta, and for including a project- and subject-specific template. E.g., on Wikipedia for every help page there is a Template:ph:{{PAGENAME}}, placed at the bottom of the page, above the links to other project-independent help pages. See e.g. w:Help:Variable.

Similarly a call to Template:ph:{{PAGENAME}} could be put in Template:hh on Meta, but this is not done, because only few pages have project-specific contents, so this would require creating many empty templates on Meta.

Therefore, for these few cases, a different method is used: such a help page calls a template specific to Meta and specific to that help page. It is given a name starting with "H:"; each project should reserve these names for this purpose. Example: Template:H:interwiki linking is used in Help:Interwiki linking. Other projects should create a template with the same name, so that they can use a copy of Help:Interwiki linking. The content of the template may be different, it may also be empty.

The method described in the last paragraph is experimental. For keeping copies of Help:Interwiki linking on other Wikimedia projects, integration of the contents of the template in the page itself would be more convenient, while for copies on external projects the examples about Wikimedia may not harm. After all, the Wikimedia projects are important examples of projects using MediaWiki software.

Internationalization

There is now a separate help namespace for each language, please consult or create the pages in other languages.

The following other namespaces exist:

1. German: [[Hilfe:Handbuch|]]
2. French: [[Aide:Aide|]]
3. Danish: [[Hjælp:Indhold|]]
4. Esperanto:
5. Swedish:
6. Spanish:
7. Italian: [[Aiuto:Aiuto|]]
8. Japanese:
9. Dutch: [[NL_Help:Inhoudsopgave|]]
10. Polish:
11. Portuguese:

Contact a developer if your language is missing, or if any of the existing ones are incorrect. Note that duplicate names are prefixed with a language code, e.g. there is "Help" (English) and "NL_Help" (Dutch).

Interlanguage links

Do not use standard interlanguage links. Instead, use Template:Hc with the "langs" parameter. A correct example would look like this: {{hc|langs=[[Hilfe:Inhalt|Deutsch]] - [[Aide:Aide|Français]]}}

• hc stands for "help contents"
• Hilfe is help in German

Style

Naming

Use short names. Help:Editing is better than Help:How to edit a page Keep in mind that you may want to link to this page many times in the future, and choose a short, descriptive name. As a guideline, try to avoid titles longer than 20 characters, and use "-ing" instead of "How to...".

Most of your links will be piped links, of the form: [[help:editing|editing]] a bug will be opened on the wikimedia bugzilla when a possible solution is found, as piped links are not quick to implement. The feature request will be something like: "hide namespace when in that namespace" then the text will look normal.

Portability

Out of namespace linking

To ensure that a wiki that has these help pages imported into it does not have broken links:

The links from this namespace to other namespaces and other projects use interwiki links or external link style.

Examples:

• help:template works, provided that that help page has been copied
• translation would point to that page on the same wiki, hence it would not work if there is no such page
• m:translation would point to http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/translation, provided that interwiki links have been set up in the wiki, including m: to Meta-Wikipedia; it would work without that page being imported into the wiki.
• w:en:HTML points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML, provided that interwiki link w: has been set to point to a Wikipedia, as is the case for Wikimedia projects (w: points from a non-Wikipedia to the Wikipedia in the same language, and from a Wikipedia to the English Wikipedia); using the prefix w:en ensures that the link also works on non-English projects that use the English help pages.

Older MediaWiki versions

When updating a help page for major MediaWiki version change, you can create a subpage with the name of the older version, and move the old instructions into that subpage.

"Help talk:" namespace

The "Help talk:" pages are for:

• discussing the documentation
• discussing the software features concerned

Discussing improvements in the software

For discussing improvements in the software, use MediaWiki feature request and bug report discussion or a separate page in the main namespace.

For formal requests use http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org/

If the bug / feature request is being fixed or implemented, one can start creating the documentation for the feature in the help namespace, but be sure to specify what version the feature is targeted for,

Moderators frown on discussion in content pages, so use the discussion page for any discussions to avoid problems. One can link to a bug on bugzilla by doing [[bugzilla:bugnumber]]</nowki> an author believes.. it might be <nowiki> {{bugzilla|bugnumber}}

Templates

/Templates is a long page, so it is implemented as a help:sub page

in development

• one for each major category,
• and one style one that takes parameters based off of admin handbook sidebar, and ed, as ed takes parameters.

perhaps this one should be on the left instead of the right? Patrick has experimented with trying them on the left, and it avoids overlaping issues with pre-formated tagged areas..

• • issues, need new stylesheet for pre, need narrower table of contents on left, really just need a book construct.

ed

(takes parameters and allows for easy editing of the template) [{{fullurl:Template:{{{1}}}|action=edit}} Edit {{{1}}}]