Project:PD help

Goal
The idea is to provide a set of pages which can be copied into a fresh wiki installation, or included in the mediawiki distribution. This will include basic user information and other Meta information, in a reasonably concise form. The basic concept is to create a compressed user guide, not a reference work. It should focus on what users want and not explain other functions.

We are not aiming to duplicate the full documentation of the technical handbook, the so called Manual.

License
Contributions to the PD Help are released as public domain (rather than the usual GNU Free Documentation License). This is necessary in order to allow people to easily copy the text into their own wiki installations. Please ensure you understand the following before contributing:


 * Every page in the PD Help must contain the line  to indicate the license.
 * No content can be copied from elsewhere into these pages, except if you are the author or have permission from the authors. Content that is already public domain can be copied here, but this does NOT include most web pages!
 * You are relinquishing all rights to the information you contribute here. Although you will continue to have your contributions listed and attributed on this site, others can copy the text without giving credit, and can modify it as they see fit.

Editorial guidelines

 * Create links between the pages, but avoid linking to other namespaces on MediaWiki.org. Keep the links internal to the public domain help pages, or make external links (full URL) to relevant resources e.g. on meta.wikipedia.org. This is to facillitate easier copying of the text into fresh wiki installations. Do not use interwiki links as these may not exist in the target wiki.
 * If linking to pages in the MediaWiki site outside of the Category:Help pages, please use external links (full URL) such as Project:Support desk. --Grymwulf 18:33, 24 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Translations should be done after the english version of a page has reached a stable status. The naming convention is.


 * Unless you have the perfect solution for navigation in this manual, please refrain from creating navigation templates and create content first.


 * We probably don't want to swap in the syntax anywhere. MediaWiki is the name of the software we are describing. This is the software that powers the destination wiki, so anywhere where our text is referring to the software (everywhere throughout help) it should be left as a literal string "MediaWiki". If for some reason the help text is mentioning the name of the site, then this would be an appropriate exception (use  ), but we are not going to swap this in everywhere where we mention the word MediaWiki.

Formatting

 * Formatting should be consistent. Use  for any tables you create, highlight cells or rows with   etc. (see Template talk:Prettytable)


 * All wiki markup and code should be put in  or   tags. Help for inserting:.


 * All menu texts and descriptions should appear in italic.

Screenshot Images
There is some discussion about whether we want screenshot images on the help pages. See the talk page here, and also Project:Current issues

Screenshots are deprecated until this is decided. i.e. Dont add any more, but dont delete the existing ones.

Advantages of screenshot images
 * An image says more than words. For friendly user help, it is important to provide illustrations.

Disadvantages of screenshot images
 * MediaWiki has a built-in import/export feature, but this doesn't work with images.
 * Licensing issues. Can MediaWiki screenshots be licensed PD?
 * We can get by without them. Nothing we describe in the help pages requires an image to illustrate.

Category
All pages in the "Help:" namespace are by definition part of this public domain Help documentation project and should be categorized Category:Help if they are in English, the default language for MediaWiki.org, or if not in English then Category:Help/fr (French), Category:Help/de (German), etc.

The former category for pages in the "Help:" namespace, this public domain Help documentation project, was Category:PD Help. In keeping with simplicity the category is now simply Category:Help and all pages have been updated.

Admin tips

 * If something in Help can be configured by a server admininstrator, you can insert an admin tip with.