Some of you remember that we do have a Help namespace. It was largely abandoned, mostly because Wikia/Fandom's own help pages would often intrude into it, and nowadays the majority of it is direct links to Community Central.
...I have no idea how Fandom's putting direct links to another wiki in Special:AllPages, that seems extremely hacky, but I digress.
Anyway that leaves a few pages, and I'm wondering if we should do anything with them. A list of what remains:
- Help:Autoconfirmed Users: Not really helpful.
- Help:Codenames: While codenames are still in use on the site, most of their uses (the class colours, side icons and navbox header images) have been deprecated, so a lot of this page is really outdated. To be honest, what's left could probably be merged into some other page, policies concerning scope and file names are the only things that really still use them.
- Help:List of Templates: Very outdated, updating might have some value, but we have a lot more templates than we did back in 2012 so it might just be too much work. The various template categories do help explain various templates a bit but sometimes names aren't 100% intuitive until you look at them. Ultimately not sure what to do with this.
- Help:Mathematical Functions, Help:Selection Functions and Help:String Functions: As far as I can tell, still pretty useful.
- Help:Userpage: A bunch of old userspace code. I don't know what value this could still hold, especially as I'm pretty sure the last time someone made a userpage in this style was several years ago.
- Help:Walkthroughs: While this could probably use some updating, this is also as far as I know the only place where we actually list policies regarding walkthroughspace and I think should be moved to projectspace.
Even with the pages we decide to keep, I don't really think we should keep them in helpspace, it's a section of the site that's effectively been dead for years and what's there is hidden among those Community Central links. Anything we salvage should be somewhere that's more noticeable. Not much point if people need help finding the help pages, after all. -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 11:59, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Well let's see:
- Help:Userpage has a lot of buggy MediaWiki code (in fact I'm pretty sure that video code is partially responsible for the big crash in November 2015) and some incorrect talk bubble instructions. We should definitely burn it so new users don't try to implement any of that code. Userpage policy is basically in our code of conduct anyways.
- Help:Walkthroughs should really be in projectspace, it's just a policy page dressed up as a help page. (A rather poorly written policy page, too, we should probably clean it up).
- Help:List of Templates could be documentation on the page Category:Templates or similar. As it is though we might as well delete it because most of what's said on there is just wrong.
Also the way that Fandom made those Community Central links is even more broken than I thought, because I wrote a page called Help:Pywikibot several years ago and now it's been totally lost to the aether and replaced by a Community Central link. Why is that even a feature?? Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 16:15, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
- Under the new MediaWiki software, Help:Codenames can be completely rewritten and moved to Module:Codename/doc. That's a much more natural home for it, and also we don't do Codename-based CSS anymore.
- Help:Walkthroughs should go in projcetspace, per Cat.
- Help:Userpage can be deleted, as Project:Conduct now covers what to include in a userpage or not.
- Help:List of Templates is useless, if you want a real list of templates, just go to Category:Templates and the template documentation will tell you what each one is for. That said, the reason for the new template naming convention is that you shouldn't even need to check; the template name will make it obvious what it does.
- The Help:x Functions pages can be deleted and outsourced either to a Fandom help page or a MediaWiki documentation page.
I remember making a forum on this a while back, but I don't think I ever did anything with it (got too busy with other wiki projects, prob VIIR). In short, though, we shouldn't really have a Help namespace anymore at all, and probably shouldn't have had one to begin with. There is nothing specific to our wiki that does not also apply to other wikis, so any contributions towards a Help page should be ones that help the broader MediaWiki community at large, not just us.--
Technobliterator TC 17:50, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
Quick update, we've received instruction on how to recover the pages that were overwritten, but we don't expect much will be of use aside from some Intangir specific documentation we had left on Help:Pywikibot. -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 21:33, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
- Okay, I've looked at the other pages that Cat did not immediately go "death to helpspace" on.
- Help:Audio: Mostly markup/coding help, which we don't need. Very amused by the bottom of the page advising users install Java and QuickTime in order to use the audio files on this site.
- Help:CSS: Entirely markup/coding. Also partway through we miss a tag so the latter third or so of the page is broken, lol.
- Help:Contents: Well if we're deleting most of helpspace this is just going to be useless.
- Help:HTML: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:Images: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:JS: A redirect to our JavaScript help page which Fandom overwrote with a redirect to their JavaScript help pages. Yo dawg...
- Help:JavaScript: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:Linking: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:Lua: Entirely markup/coding. Also several of the examples are broken.
- Help:Magic Words: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:MediaWiki: Quick explainer of what MediaWiki is, not sure why we had this in the first place.
- Help:Rollback: Project:Staff exists, and anyway rollback is the legacy mod position, not the current one (altho we have recently noticed that rollback still has our custom rights set up while the current mod role doesn't, but that's a different discussion).
- Help:System messages: Man remember sitenotice, that thing was jank as fuck but it still worked really well. Anyway, the only part possibly relevant to non-admins is just a minor markup thing that I don't know if it's still accurate.
- Help:Tables: Entirely markup/coding.
- Help:Templates: This is even more outdated than Help:List of Templates.
- So a grand total of 0 pages worth keeping. -- Some Color Mage ~ (Talk) 22:21, 2 May 2021 (UTC)
A few days later, and Helpspace has been razed with the exception of the three Math pages. I believe these are somewhat customized to FFWiki, so I'm fine with leaving them as they are (possibly moved to Projectspace), unless the relevant scripts have already been merged to devwiki. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 19:40, 4 May 2021 (UTC)
- Move to template documentation if we're going to use them at all imo.-- Technobliterator TC 20:06, 4 May 2021 (UTC)