Support/Documentation review

One of Wikimedia Sverige's (WMSE) projects is aimed at increasing the participation in, and use of, translatewiki.net. As part of this we have made an inventory of the existing documentation on translatewiki.net. The reason for doing this, and for bringing it up here, is that we believe an overview will make it easier to focus efforts on improving the documentation and making it easier for new translators to join.

As part of this we have tried to give each page a weight. Based on the weight we will then start the work of improving the page in different ways. E.g. with more detailed descriptions, with images and videos etc. and with translations into Swedish. We will start with the page with the highest weight and work down the list. The community is of course invited to give feedback and/or make changes during this process.

The weighting reflects how important WMSE believes a page is to enable someone, with no prior knowledge of how translatewiki.net functions, to start translating and become an active member of the community. We welcome others to add their own weightings according to the same criteria.

The comments in the "comment" column reflect the initial thoughts when we read through the page and identifying the topic. They are in no way absolute so if you disagree or have other suggestions for improvement these are very welcome, although it's probably easiest to bring these up as a thread on the talk page instead.

General thoughts

 * All of the documentation pages would probably benefit from having something like the template "In a nutshell" which gives a short and concise explanation of what the page is about and whom it is aimed at.
 * Similarly decommissioned pages could get a template making this status clear so as to avoid confusion.
 * I'd rather have users not get lost where they didn't mean to go. Probably a clearer separation of namespaces and paths would help. Most of the work was already done, by moving MediaWiki-specific stuff under Translating:MediaWiki and Translate-specific stuff to mw:Help:Extension:Translate.
 * Needs clarification: the distinction between Project, Translating and Main namespaces. It was already decided to drop one (by making "Translating" the "Project" namespace, probably), but would that work?
 * A hub for discussions related to the site, separate from error/enhancement reporting which fills up Support, might be useful. It could additionally serve as a natural place for beginners to ask questions, especially if the portal for their language is not very active. Alternatively a hub specifically aimed at helping new users (similar to w:en:Wikipedia:Adopt-a-user).
 * A step-by-step guide for some common tasks might be useful. WMSE are already going to create some videos for this and there may also be suggestions in File:Translate-workflow-spec.pdf.

Generic communication
Pages with a specific audience (past or current), but not part of the translators' or project contacts' workflow.

Internal pages
Not really meant to be read by anyone other than authors/collaborators, staff and insanely curious users. Often related to specific projects, past or future.