On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Sage Rossragesoss+wikipedia@gmail.com wrote:

Cross-posting to Wikien-l...

On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Erik Moellererik@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Unfortunately, community-created help pages tend to accumulate vast amounts of instruction cruft that distracts from simple high-level information.

Maybe it's time English Wikipedia (at least) created a set of standards for help pages and a process for identifying good ones. "Manual of Style (help pages)", "Helpful help page candidates" and "What is a helpful help page?", anyone?  (The latter two are only half facetious; the first is probably a good idea, although I would have no idea where to start.)

Good help is not neutral, and I suspect it's seldom produced by consensus.

When someone needs help they usually want precisely ONE way to solve the problem. There may be a dozen good ones but if a person knew what they wanted they wouldn't need help, so if you make people choose many will throw up their hands.

You don't need to deny the existence of all but one solution, but you can't make people wade without losing a lot of them. This naturally means that many reasonably solutions will get an unfair treatment.

Compare:

http://www.fsf.org/resources/formats/playogg

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Media_help_%28Ogg%29

I'm generally the one complaining against dumbing things down to the least common denominator, but help pages are a place where it really counts.