Project talk:PD help

Archive 1

Links
The suggestion this page makes about links are just impossible: links to manual pages and special pages are absolutely needed to make the documentation useful and readable. Nobody respects the current "rule"; the most careful people have been using Mediawiki. I have posted a question about its handling of the special pages links: Template_talk:Mediawiki. Nemo 19:48, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Would also like to have links that that open the page in another window for example target='_blank' in html.. have not seen that done yet. It anoying to have to right click on the link and select open in a new tab all the time.
 * Sorry, what are you talking about? Links to help pages in the interface usually work like this. If you mean standard wikilinks, there's no way to do it and it's discouraged anyway, use your central mouse button. Nemo 18:54, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Links to Meta
What about links to Meta, where some help pages still are? «Do not use interwiki links as these may not exist in the target wiki». Meta is in the default interwiki map, so the argument doesn't apply much and I always interpreted this sentence not to forbid interwiki links to Meta. One issue is that the oldest wikis may only have "MetaWikipedia" as prefix. Cc Pathoschild per. --Nemo 07:06, 14 February 2015 (UTC)

Centralising help pages
I've filed two bugs which should help this project: --Nemo 22:48, 26 January 2013 (UTC)
 * Bug 44286 – Allow (interwiki) hard redirect whitelisting: this should help avoiding duplication of help pages on wikis which want to be able to link them as local pages.
 * Bug 43591 – Link translatable help pages on mediawiki.org from the relevant special pages: this is necessary to make help pages really discoverable and easy to use; the hard navigation of manuals is often their worse deficiency, more than their content (people are not able to use search, nowadays). en.wiki already does something like this, in a limited and ugly fashion.

Way too hard to navigate
I just spent 15 minutes of fruitless search for basic information explaining which kinds of copyright licenses qualify for Wikimedia Commons and which don't.

Such things should be extremely easy to find--

Navigation on Wikimedia is byzantine and cryptic. For example when you pass from "Wikimedia Commons" to "MediaWiki" there is nothing that explains what MediaWiki is, or what the difference is between Wikimedia Commons and MediaWiki is...  No wonder Wikimedia has an editor and admin shortage. You have to be really, really patient to learn the most basic stuff. Cliffswallow-vaulting (talk) 22:56, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Oh yes, and now that I am in "MediaWiki", my signature doesn't work (even though I am currently logged in on Wikimeda Ciommona). Apparently I need to create yet another new account here, for this mysterious "Wikirealm", whose mission is not even described.


 * Keep draining my precious time and I'll join the list of ex-editors...
 * Cliffswallow-vaulting (talk) 22:58, 6 April 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry that you have experienced that problem, but as you have just noticed, this is mediawiki.org, a web site about MediaWiki (the software), not commons.wikimedia.org. Such policy about licenses should be found on commons.wikimedia.org. I'd recommend to raise your concerns there. --Ciencia Al Poder (talk) 09:44, 7 April 2014 (UTC)

Templates
What templates are acceptable for use on the PD Help pages? I imagine they'd have to be PD as well?

Also, are there some that should be included on every page? (Is there a way to automatically preload a page skeleton for every new page in the Help namespace?) &mdash;SamB (talk) 18:52, 11 April 2015 (UTC)