On 21/10/2007, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 10/21/07, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
I'm sorry, but "missing manual"? We have excellent help pages that will guide a newbie through everything from just starting to writing featured articles to resolving the most entrenched disputes. [[Help:Tutorial]] is an excellent place to start.
We have help pages, but with all due respect to the people who wrote them, they are not "excellent". Compare our tutorial to the one created by WikiEducator:
http://wikieducator.org/Help:Contents
That one contains audio messages and screencasts, and is pedagogically structured with objectives, activities, and assessments. When I organize wiki workshops, I usually point people to this as a reference, rather than our own internal help.
I think Wikimedia in general (although I'm only thinking of en.wikipedia, commons and MediaWiki) isn't very good at producing very good help and documentation. I think it's because writing this kind of documentation seems dull next to using our time to produce content. What could be done to improve our documentation and recruit more people to documentation/help-writing?