[Foundation-l] Quality of community-created help pages (was: Recommending a Browser...)

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 12:57 AM, Sage Ross<ragesoss+wikipedia at gmail.com> wrote:
> Cross-posting to Wikien-l...
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2009 at 9:01 PM, Erik Moeller<erik at 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.