Wikipedia:Help Project/Overview

There are many different parts to the help system, the purpose of this page is to provide an overview of how they fit together.

History of the Help Pages
The original concept was to have main help pages on MediaWiki. Using templates, the MediaWiki content would be transcluded onto the various Wikipedia pages, then content specific to that Wikipedia would be added to the end of the page. Various other extra help pages where created on Wikipedia that had no equivalent on MediaWiki like how-tos and essays, wome of which developed into guidelines.

Unfortunately, the MediaWiki pages were never updated and the different language versions of Wikipedia began to diverge in many ways. This led to the material being regularly copied across and merged into Wikipedia's help, but sometime in 2008, the final merge was performed and this concept was abandoned, with the templates removed and deleted. Help pages have then been updated without regard for the other Wikipedias, but now includes help that is more relevant to en.Wikipedia.

There have been many attempts to bring sense to the Help System, but in isolation and faced with the complexity of the task no general structure has yet been agreed upon. Several areas or set of pages have developed well and there are several projects that work on a subsets of Help effectively.

In September and October 2009, this project added its banner to many of the help pages, with a view to bringing all the relevant discussions and editors into contact with each another.

Short Nav Box
For new users to follow a predefined course, and intermediate editors access to commonly used help pages for reference

Complete Nav Box
To see how much info we can get in it for intermediate/experienced editors without it going BANG! - I.e advanced topics only accessed once in a blue moon

Historical
A list of help links created by previous project: Help Project/Link repository.

Found on a users page: