User:Trizek (WMF)/Sandbox

Help panel to be deployed on your wiki in next several days
Hello

As part of their experiments to welcome newcomers, the Growth team is going to deploy the help panel [LINK TO PREVIOUS POST ON THE WIKI ABOUT THE HELP PANEL] on this wiki in the next several days.

This experiment will allow newcomers to post questions directly to the help desk from the page they are editing, and will likely lead to an increase in the number of questions posted to the help desk every day. To try out the help panel, you can enable it in the "Editing" section of your preferences.

Questions from the help panel will all have section headers beginning with "Help panel question". Those edits will also be tagged with.

When you reply:


 * Ping the user when you reply. Newcomers may not know how to come back to the Help Desk and monitor replies. A notification is the best option to tell them a reply has been posted.
 * If the newcomer has saved an edit, check which editor has been used, if possible. (The newcomer, however, may not have publish any edit).
 * Keep in mind that the newcomer may not have visited the Help Desk yet, and may not know how to continue the conversation on the page. You can consider explaining that to reply, they can edit the Help Desk page and add their message below yours.

The community has also gathered some advice and best practices on how to reply to newcomers on Help Desks. We hope that will help you!

We thank you in advance for the time you will spend on helping newcomers!