Help Guide
Hi everybody,
I've been thinking a bit about how to make our instruction pages easier to find and use. I have seen a need for this when I have been organizing translate-a-thons for new users (as part of my work at Wikimedia Sverige). A draft is started on User:Jopparn/Help guide and I would love comments and ideas. Next week me and my colleague will start writing on the text (the plan is that we start at number 1 and work our down the list).
We have also been working on a number of videos that we would like to include there as soon as subtitles are added (and videos are activated here).
I hope you think that this sounds good. Let me know either way :-)
Cheers,
How does this connect to the previous Support/Documentation review?
It's not clear to me what you are proposing to do. It's certainly not a good idea to create more pages, while it's good to consolidate existing ones. Generic information (not specific to translatewiki.net) should be on mediawiki.org and not be replicated here. Video are very nice; TimedMediaHandler however still refuses to work with Translate (i.e. to use language-code subpages), will you also be able to fix that bug?
Something I identified earlier as regards Translate's documentation is that mw:Help:Extension:Translate lists help pages by kind of action, while often we need a list/walkthrough by persona/role. "Just" presenting the information better would do a lot.
Hi!
Thank you for your questions, and sorry for the late reply! I had a bunch of hard deadlines these last two weeks.
The idea with the document review was to get an overview to see what has been done before and what is still missing. Now when we have the pages structured it's easy to get an overview and figure out how we can now connect them better and consolidate existing ones in a more structured way, and by doing so reduce redundancy and improve clarity.
The help pages will be a good entry point for beginners so that they, step-by-step, can understand the platform and how to contribute. They will mostly connect existing material with short summaries (as is done on Wikipedia's instruction pages). The summaries will make it easier to find the material that exists here or on other wikis (as they will include the keywords that people will search for). When I have organized events to teach newbies on other wikis the value of worked through help pages has been very clear. (The main audience is the translators and not the developers.)
I think that the easiest is to discuss further when we have some concrete examples ready. Hopefully I will have something ready to show you all next week.
Kind regards,