User talk:Bdk

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Reverts at Help:Namespace
Hi there! I wanted to ask if you could explain a bit more why you reverted my edits to Help:Namespace. I thought I understood the project's scope when I started, but clearly I'm missing something. I was working on expanding the very minimal content there with ideas from meta:Help:Namespace and en:wiki:Help:Namespace. I agree that perhaps some of the content I added would have been better placed at Manual:Namespace, but do you really think that the original version was better than any of my edits? Happy ‑ melon 15:07, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Hello Happy-melon, I reverted your edits because your additions were (and are again now) too detailed for a basic help page, and because you mixed up content that clearly belong to the manual namespace with usual help content. Well, good help pages follow the KISS principle (linked from the summary). They are as short and as compacted as possible (= not too detailed, not cluttered e.g. with needless subheadings or information that only experienced users understand like e.g. the API hint you added, it's not self-explanatory). – Please always keep in mind that these help pages have to focus on what real wiki newbies want to know. The audience is a very general and broad one (thousands of very small, private or intranet wikis; lots of them even administered by people who know less about wikis than you and I do, some of them haven't even edited Wikipedia before they installed MediaWiki …).
 * Please don't take the following personal, but I don't see an attempt to restrain the content of Help:Namespaces to these needs in your edits. It seems you want this page as detailed as possible (maybe geared to Wikipedia's extensive help?). The former versions aren't perfect too, of course not … so I'll try to rewrite the page soon, perhaps that's better to understand than long explanations ;-)
 * Hmm, I also noted your new page Help:Extension:ParserFunctions. Generally this is a better attempt (creating additional help pages instead of adding all possible details to one help page). I'm unsure about its naming ("extension:" in the title seems needless) and location (in the help namespace) though – the PD set of basic help pages should only explain stuff that is available with the default installation.
 * Anyway, thanks for your edits so far. We'll see … -- :bdk: 01:45, 26 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your response. I certainly agree and am aware that these help pages need to accomodate users with very minimal wiki experience, but I'm not sure that I agree that keeping the help minimalistic is the best way to go about it.  The way I see it, we should rather be structuring the help system to be cumulative, gradually leading readers on from simple things to more advanced features.  Maybe some indication of the level of knowledge required would be helpful, but I can't see any justification for less than full documentation.  Otherwise we are simply neglecting to document features that are useful. How we go about organising that 'learning curve', I agree, is a matter for debate, and it may be that splitting such material into separate pages would be preferable.  But given that we're trying to write a documentation that can stand alone entirely independently of mediawiki.org, I don't think that saying "people who want advanced features can read the Manual: pages" is viable; all of the MediaWiki features that are of use to wiki editors should be available in PD namespaces.
 * That leads on to Help:Extension:ParserFunctions; there is currently an ongoing discussion at Project:Forum on this. I agree that having it in the Help: namespace is not ideal, but I maintain that it must be in a PD namespace, or it defeats the whole object of having help here in the first place.  Really, I think we need an "Extension help:" namespace. Happy ‑ melon 12:29, 26 December 2008 (UTC)

Hi, some time ago I put a request in to move Help:ParserFunctions from Meta, which relates to this discussion. There was the suggestion that Extension:ParserFunctions was going to be moved into the core mediaWiki code, if this is the case in the future then having a name such as Help:Extension:ParserFunctions would not be useful. Also making titles look like nested namespaces when internally in the mysql [PREFIX_]page table they are stored at a single level e.g. 12 =>Help: page_namespace with Extension:ParserFunctions page_title doesn't seem to be a good way of naming pages. I tend to agree that either Help: or Manual: namespaces is a more appropriate place for documentation on ParserFunctions, and Extension: for availabillity and installation. Regarding the KISS principle, linking and embedding of additional more advanced material I think is the way to go. --Zven 22:35, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree that the "Help:Extension:" construction is not ideal; but it seems to me a simple way to preserve the disctinction between 'core help' and 'extension help' while still satisfying the other issues. If, as you say, ParserFunctions is moved into the core code, we will then need a public domain help page to include in the core help documentation.  We would then have realised that we'd shot ourselves in the foot if we'd spent the past few months writing a beautiful howto in the Manual: or Extension: namespaces and then realise that it's under the wrong license.  This is why I maintain that help content should be in a public domain namespace; of which the only one currently available is Help:. We can move content from Help: to any other namespace with impunity, but moving content into that namespace is an utter pig. Why not put it there to begin with? Happy ‑ melon 22:56, 6 January 2009 (UTC)
 * ParserFunctions is presently on the "do not merge" list. —Emufarmers(T 03:47, 8 January 2009 (UTC)