Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Meta-based Help: content templates


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.  

The result of the discussion was keep but deprecate and delete keep the templates for now, but once their content has been appropriately moved/substituted elsewhere they can be deleted. Enter CambridgeBayWeather, waits for audience applause, not a sausage 12:37, 22 February 2009 (UTC)

Meta-based Help: content templates

 * !ll on
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * !ll on
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * All templates with the prefix "Ph:" (not all tagged)
 * Category:Handbook templates
 * Category:Meta duplicate pages
 * Help:Handbook guidelines
 * Help:MediaWiki help policy
 * Help:Help page footer templates
 * Help:Help page footer templates

These structures, and others, comprised the infrastructure for the system whereby help content was to be written on metawiki and copied here by a bot; users here were explicitly discouraged from editing the copies here, with templates at the top of each help page saying "edits will be overwritten in the next update from meta". This system is long-since defunct; the last systematic update was literally years ago. With a recent discussion highlighting this issue, it is time to take action. These structures contain useful help content, indeed, but having it split amongst so many esoteric templates makes it impossible to do anything productive with it. The templates should be substituted and deleted, the categories will then be superfluous, and the associated help pages will be no longer relevant, and should be deleted. So note that this is not a proposal for an outright deletion, but a 'controlled demolition' to retain the content while dramatically reducing the complexity of the system. Happy‑melon 18:09, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Not everything is moving from Meta the MediaWiki wiki. The MediaWiki User Guide is intended to be public domain, not GFDL, for a start.  This is so that anyone, not just WikiMedia Foundation wikis, can use in on a MediaWiki wiki. You also have the history backwards.  Content wasn't moved from the Help: to the Wikipedia: namespace.  Quite the reverse.  How to edit a page predates Help:Editing by several years, notice.  The general order, for most help content (albeit with some exceptions) was this:  The help pages were first written at Wikipedia, in the project namespace.  Meta didn't even exist at the time.  They were later copied from there to Meta by Mav.  Then later still they were copied from Meta to the Help: namespace at Wikipedia by Patrick, who also invented the template system and "master help" notices.  The fact that the pages started here, but only a few people at Wikipedia made much of an effort to reduce the overlap between the project-independent help (Editing wiki markup is the same across all projects.) and the project-specific copies, is one of the reasons that we have the situation as it is today. Encouraging the second set of forks to be independently edited is only exacerbating the problem, not addressing it properly.  We already have a first set of independent forks, the ones at Meta.  We don't want more.  Addressing the problem properly would involve reducing the number of forks, not increasing them. The reason that the updates don't happen regularly, by the way, is that the helpful volunteer who made the updates happen on a regular basis &mdash; me &mdash; turned that part of xyr 'bot off some time ago.   Since then, the machine that it runs on has encountered a succession of problems with its connection to Internet, not the least of which was that it became very expensive for several months.  Uncle G (talk) 20:04, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * I didn't say (here) that it was. While I freely admit that my personal opinion is that mediawiki.org should be the ultimate location for all our "technical" help content, that is not the theme of this discussion.  This is essentially about whether it still makes sense to break each help page into four sections and store them in two different namespaces under a confusing medley of structures; and present the content in such a way as to suggest that editing it here is pointless because it will soon be overwritten with fresh new stuff from meta.  Let's just be clear here, while I and others are very grateful to you for the work you did in that 'era', that era is past: the last time these pages were systematically updated was in 2006.  I still want there to be help pages here on en.wiki when this discussion is over.  I just don't see the need for the content to be broken up, with bits segregated into "wikipedia only" corners and secreted away in the Template: namespace, when A) the remaining content is being increasingly customised to be wikipedia-specific anyway, B) the situation which required it to be segregated no longer exists, and C) it deters editors from helping to improve what is already our most undersupported namespace.  You're quite right, we should be working to reduce the forks: that's why content is being moved from meta (and actually, almost all of it is going - I'm a mediawiki.org admin; I've imported some of it myself :D).  But we have a content fork right here without looking any further; let's clear up our own patch before looking elsewhere. Happy‑melon 22:20, 10 February 2009 (UTC)


 * Tentative Keep, let's determine if this is salvageable first before deleting it all. —Locke Cole • t • c 20:23, 10 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete all. Substitute (where appropriate) and delete all. This system stopped working long ago. Some of the templates (like H:Local time variables) formed parts of help pages that now are redirected to MediWiki. Ruslik (talk) 20:50, 14 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Slowly deprecate and delete. While this doesn't seem salvageable (and in fact seems quite messy), more haste would mean less speed. Stifle (talk) 10:36, 16 February 2009 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.