Wikipedia talk:Introduction (historical)

Default sandbox
Sandbox should be replaced with draft:sandbox, since the latter allows testing with VisualEditor, and so is more useful to new users (the group most likely to need to test out their editing). T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 06:38, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

❌ for various reasons:


 * 1) This is not the talk of the sandbox
 * 2) Sandbox is not fully protected
 * 3) It's barely clear what you want done, I can imagine that you want WP:Sandbox to be redirected to Draft:sandbox; for such a thing, seek consensus on the right page Lil Johnny (talk) (contribs) 00:49, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Protected edit request

 * to as per MediaWiki talk:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning--Moxy (talk) 13:20, 19 December 2017 (UTC)
 * Yes check.svg Done &mdash; Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:10, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Proposal to overhaul WP:I and WP:T
I've put up a proposal at the Village Pump to replace the old WP:I and WP:T with the superior Help:Intro. Any opinions welcomed there. T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 02:41, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

The tutorial section looks like a tab, but clicking it brings you away from the introduction's folder layout entirely
Seems like that needs a redesign, it's an unexpected and inconsistent change in interface. -- occono (talk) 22:52, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Proposal: Redirect this page and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction
Among tutorial-style introductions (so distinct from the main non-tutorial introduction, WP:Contributing to Wikipedia), it is clear that WP:Introduction and the associated WP:Tutorial are markedly inferior to Help:Introduction, the redesigned version put together from ~2015 to ~2018 and recently updated to be more mobile-friendly. They are less up-to-date, less comprehensive, less usable, etc. 's proposal to make this change two years ago may have reached consensus to proceed, but was archived before it could be closed. As I have argued before, we should be no less aggressive about merging duplicate content in WP-space than we are in mainspace — keeping it around confuses newcomers by creating a maze and wastes editors' time improving/maintaining duplicate resources.

In terms of technical implementation, since these pages have been so important in the past, I think a copy of them should be preserved. I propose that they be moved to WP:Old (original name) (e.g. WP:Old Introduction), given a historical tag with a note about the renaming, and then the original address redirected to Help:Introduction. Per the page protections, we'll need to get an admin to help perform the move.

As we've seen over the past few weeks, the Wikipedia Help Project has become pretty inactive lately, but if those of us remaining here (,, and anyone else who sees this and wants to chime in) are all on the same page, that might be sufficient to establish consensus and save us the trouble of having to post at the Village Pump and get everyone there up to speed on why this is necessary. Let's act boldly and get this done. Cheers, Sdkb (talk) 05:21, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Think having only a few module style tutorials is more then enough as we know they are not effective as people dont complete them |Wikipedia:TWA/1/Start|Wikipedia:TWA/2/Start|Wikipedia:TWA/3/Start adventure stats show all gone by page 3....Nevertheless keep The_Wikipedia_Adventure (for fun)  and redirect WP:Tutorial  to Help:Introduction despite it being a navigational black hole it works better in mobile view and seems to |Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor/2|Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor/3|Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor/4|Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor/5|Help:Introduction_to_editing_with_VisualEditor/6retain retain  25% of its readers. WP:Introduction should be transformed into a normal page for easy of use with a TOC for section navigation over tab loading to a list of links....or  redirected to Help:Contents that cover topics not covered in most  how to "edit" tutorials (Report a problem - Find an article - Donating info - etc..).-- Moxy 🍁 06:27, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Because WP:Introduction has been substituted a gazillion times in the standard welcome template and elsewhere, we're somewhat stuck with keeping it to its current use as a tutorial-style intro to WP for contributors, even though its name could also have fit with other uses, such as a redirect to WP:About or WP:Getting Started or Help:Contents. I'm hoping we can approach this as a somewhat unified front; anything else and we'll most likely end up stuck with the status quo. Sdkb (talk) 07:38, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm obviously pretty biased on this, since when I came across the original 'introduction to references' by user:The wub, I was inspired to to create a wider set based on the same style! I've found in my outreach and editathons that I've had better feedback on them than for WP:I and WP:T. One thing to note is that even though there's a drop-off in multi-tabbed information pages, there's also a drop-off in scrolling down long pages, and WP:T already has quite a few tabs, which go into some detail (e.g on tables, or manually writing tags in markup). Overall, I'd put Help:contents as more useful than WP:Introduction, though I think in the context of people going to WP:Tutorial, Help:Introduction might be more useful. Might also be worth considering the left hand menu's "interaction" section (thgouh I suspect that more new editors come to the relevant pages via welcome templates than the left hand links). Perhaps a useful scoping question is "If starting with a clean slate today, what would the ideal system look like?". Perhaps we could define a couple of 'ideal scenarios' over at the Wikipedia Help Project? T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 09:40, 5 March 2020 (UTC)
 * or another admin with experience in the help space, would you be willing to assist us with this? Sdkb (talk) 05:02, 7 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Comment Anyone here may also be interested in the proposal to get rid of Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia. Sdkb (talk) 18:40, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

RfC
Should we redirect WP:Introduction and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction? Sdkb (talk) 22:10, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Support as proposer. Copying my comment from above:
 * Among tutorial-style introductions (so distinct from the main non-tutorial introduction, WP:Contributing to Wikipedia), it is clear that WP:Introduction and the associated WP:Tutorial are markedly inferior to Help:Introduction, the redesigned version put together from ~2015 to ~2018 and recently updated to be more mobile-friendly. They are less up-to-date, less comprehensive, less usable, etc. 's proposal to make this change two years ago may have reached consensus to proceed, but was archived before it could be closed. As I have argued before, we should be no less aggressive about merging duplicate content in WP-space than we are in mainspace — keeping it around confuses newcomers by creating a maze and wastes editors' time improving/maintaining duplicate resources. Sdkb (talk) 22:10, 12 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Support as main contributor of the  tutorial  up for redirect  Wikipedia:Tutorial.  |Wikipedia:TWA/1/Start|Wikipedia:TWA/2/Start|Wikipedia:TWA/3/Start Next style pages dont hold readers well so why have 4 of them (4th being the Wikipedia adventure).....best keep the one that has interested editors updating it. That said much cleanup will need to be done ...like section links to Tutorial/Editing will need to go to Help:Editing that covers both editing environments (WikiText and VE) or like Tutorial/Citing sources will need to go to Help:Referencing for beginners that again covers both editing environments because Help:Introduction divides  WikiText and VE over different pages.-- Moxy 🍁 01:37, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Support. Though certainly not perfect, I think that Help:intro is overall the better option than WP:T, and even WP:I. I think the useful throught experiment is "how would we organise onboarding tutorials if designing from scratch". The main objections raised two years ago have all been addressed in the subsequent time. In particular, the and  templates have now been updated to use flexbox css to display well on phones and narrow desktop windows (thank you to  for the initial design, and  for css advice). Indeed, I beleive that they are now more mobile-friendly than the current WP:T page. In expanding the series, I've tried to follow UX guideslines where possible (<70 characters per line, <250 words per tab, <6 tabs per tutorial). They also allow users to choose whether they're getting info on markup or visualeditor rather than a mix (which can be confusing to very new users). Sidenote: this is also a problem with a lot of templates that aim to implement multilpe tabs (compare Tutorial vs WikiJournal_User_Group for a flexbox equivalent for tabs). T.Shafee(Evo &#38; Evo)talk 09:27, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Support streamlining the introduction and tutorial pages so that we can manage and improve them more efficiently. Introduction seems redundant to the modernized Help:Introduction to Wikipedia. Tutorial seems inferior to the pages linked from Help:Introduction for both Wikimarkup and the Visual Editor. Ajpolino (talk) 16:50, 13 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Support for the reasons cited above but with the proviso that even more attention should be given to adapting the page display for use by mobile contributors. Despite significant improvements, it currently still works best in full screen display on desktops and laptops. The various limitations of using mobile phones for editing could perhaps be stressed more strongly.--Ipigott (talk) 07:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
 * I added a note about mobile editing that appears when viewing the page on a mobile device. Thanks for the suggestion! &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 02:32, 4 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Comment I've left a note announcing this discussion and RfC at Help_talk:Introduction and Wikipedia_talk:Tutorial, in case there's anyone watching those pages who isn't watching this one. Seems the obvious places. Pam  D  07:28, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
 * Lets close this up as snow move (no objections) and ask for help moving all!!-- Moxy 🍁 14:14, 7 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, with the RfC tag having just been removed, the consensus here seems very clear, so it doesn't look like it needs a formal close. Since some of the things this involves are move-protected, I'm going to add an admin help tag here. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:33, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Implementation
We request help enacting the SNOW results of the above RfC. Could you turn WP:Introduction and WP:Tutorial into historical pages, with the original targets redirecting to Help:Introduction? Thanks! &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 23:41, 11 April 2020 (UTC)
 * ( Non-administrator comment ) Listed at WP:RM/T. I see admins patrolling that page. In my experience, that page moves faster than the does.  I put your username instead of mine in the   parameter of the request templates. Stay well, Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 16:06, 12 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I would have made the move, but I think you need to get an admin to close the RfC, and mostly I think you should decide whether to redirect or to move to "(historical)". L293D (☎ • ✎) 01:59, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * To be honest a redirect would be fine....edit history remains intact at its original location to be viewed. A move is simply not needed as its a new page altogether being targeted....history of the evolution on the page is not needed since is a new page. We also have this talk page as a history of what happened. Would.be  confusing and complicated to merger two histories  and view them separately.-- Moxy 🍁 02:53, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay, so this is somewhat messy currently. moved the page to Introduction (historical), so the page history is there, although they didn't move the associated header or this associated talk page. They then re-added the content to this page. I'm not sure how the redirect bots are handling it.  why do you think it's necessary to get an admin to close the RfC? There were no objections, and there was decent participation/wide enough advertising, so it seems a textbook  result. You're uninvolved, so you should feel free to close it yourself; there's no need to write out a long closing statement, since again, there's no one on the other side to object. I don't have a strong preference about whether or not to create a historical page, but I think, given how important a page this has been, it'd be nice to have a more accessible record of it. Either way, our focus should be just getting this implemented (it's long overdue), not ticking every bureaucratic box. &#123;{u&#124;  Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 05:02, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

based on what Moxy said (beginning To be honest a redirect would be fine...) and the situation Anthony Appleyard's encountered (see above), should we just...copy the original page's contents, paste them to the "(historical)" pages, and attribute in the edit summary? I ask because this situation may be similar enough to archiving talk page conversations that we could use the same approach. Stay well, and thanks again! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 17:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * For information, see Administrators' noticeboard. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:29, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * My message quoted:
 * "See in https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requested_moves/Technical_requests&oldid=950645337, the section "Moves needing help from someone with oversight". I tried to obey the first move, and it refused "took more than 3 seconds, ran out of time", and it asked me to move the page and its talk page and all its subpages one at a time. So, as a start, I moved Introduction by itself, and it worked, Then I moved Wikipedia talk:Introduction by itself and it refused "ran out of time" and system fault, several times. So, to restore to the starting setup, I tried to move Introduction (historical) back to Introduction by itself, and it refused "ran out of time" and system fault, several times. So, to make the page and its subpages work, I copied the current edit of Introduction (historical) back to Introduction by itself. It looks like it needs someone with oversight to obey these moves. " Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:32, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * The original requested moves were:
 * - - - - - - - - - - - - Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * - - - - - - - - - - - - Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * - - - - - - - - - - - - Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * - - - - - - - - - - - - Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Just now I tried again to move Introduction (historical) back to Introduction by itself, and it refused "Database error / To avoid creating high replication lag, this transaction was aborted because the write duration (4.107429265976) exceeded the 3 second limit. If you are changing many items at once, try doing multiple smaller operations instead. / [XpTIzwpAMOIAAnl9zXEAAACQ] 2020-04-13 20:17:26: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBTransactionSizeError". What is needed is some admin with the power to make such bulky page moves.Anthony Appleyard (talk) 20:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your efforts, . I'm not sure technically who that would need to be, but perhaps someone else does. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 20:29, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
 * can you unprotect the pages involved to a level a template editor can do this? (me). -- Moxy 🍁 22:52, 13 April 2020 (UTC)


 * ✅. Also, page Introduction (historical) has at least 15000 edits :: no wonder that trying to move it causes snags and system faults. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 03:35, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I tried to move Wikipedia talk:Introduction to Wikipedia talk:Introduction (historical), and it failed with a system error, likeliest due to long edit history. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:38, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yup same problem...will write am email to someone see if they can breakup the page. I moved it to user page...cant move it back ...will try again when servers are less full.-- Moxy 🍁 22:23, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Perhaps User:Ad Orientem could try....page locked up again before completed.-- Moxy 🍁 04:20, 15 April 2020 (UTC)


 * At 22:17, 14 April 2020 User:Moxy moved page Introduction (historical) to User:Moxy Introduction (historical) without leaving a redirect. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 20:08, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yup got locked up again before all completed.. oh well. Waiting on an email.-- Moxy 🍁 21:27, 15 April 2020 (UTC)
 * This is a complete mess right now. Who knows whether the redirects are now pointing to User:Moxy Introduction (historical), and whether they're being deleted as cross-namespace. And I'm noticing on my watchlist that stuff is happening at Wikidata that's probably messing things up further. This needed concerted and sustained attention to get completed in one go, and I understand there were unanticipated technical snags, but where do we go to escalate and get someone to fix them? VPT? AN? Do we need a bureaucrat or sysop or something? The problem is just going to get worse the longer it stays in this partially-completed state. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 18:30, 16 April 2020 (UTC)


 * So everything is exactly how it started off before anything happened.... except for an odd copy in a place  no one will ever see it. So back to the start....still waiting on reply to my email. But why not just redirect in the meantime....page history is the only thing not intact...but can be moved when possible if it's even needed. -- Moxy 🍁 01:40, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Um, page history is not just disposable — it's pretty crucial. It seems to reside at User:Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) currently. And I'm not sure that the redirects and Wikidata pages are in fact intact. This is a massive mess at this point that someone is going to need to clean up. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 07:43, 17 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Here's how we can fix this. The current Introduction can be moved to Introduction (historical) (like requested), and then deleted. Then, the old version currently located somewhere in userspace can be moved there and deleted. Then, we can restore every single revision on the new page.  Anarchyte ( talk  &#124;  work )  03:31, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Whelp, I accidentally titled it Wikipedia:Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) but luckily in order to get it down to where it allows me to move it, this is the only related page with the wrong name. All subpages and talk pages have not been moved yet. I'll do those once the software stops yelling at me (0.5s too long).  Anarchyte ( talk  &#124;  work )  03:37, 18 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Please see Administrators' noticeboard.  Anarchyte ( talk  &#124;  work )  03:59, 18 April 2020 (UTC)

( Non-administrator comment ) Closing template as admins have escalated this issue to sysadmin. My move request led to Steward requests/Miscellaneous; a steward there has also pinged a sysadmin. System administrators reads if you need something to be done...file a ticket on phabricator.wikimedia.org. The discussions on AN led to. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 02:28, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

✅. The page was redirected to Help:Introduction. I did not read the whole discussion above; but to have this page redirect the reader to some "user's" "historical" definitely doesn't make sense. If someone types in the search bar "Wikipedia:Introduction", then he or she is searching for the "introduction to Wikipedia". -- -- -- 04:42, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * ❌ this is not yet done. You jumping in and making changes, including opening a redirect discussion, without familiarizing yourself with what's going on is not helpful. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 07:08, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry. Please feel free to undo my changes if you feel that's better. -- -- -- 10:09, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * &#x2713; Done. Wikimedia sysadmin reply on Meta: I've ignored subpages and the like, if any of them is too big to handle, ping me and I'll try my best. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 18:15, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Okay! I'll try seeing if I can handle some of the subpages. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 18:50, 22 April 2020 (UTC)

Continued implementation
Okay, so taking stock of where we are, Introduction has now successfully been moved to Introduction (historical) with the history intact. Remaining tasks (feel free to cross these out as they're done): Whew, this is complex. Glad we're getting there, though. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 19:16, 22 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Move this talk page to Wikipedia talk:Introduction (historical) (requires admin access) ✅
 * Move the header from Introduction/Header to Introduction (historical)/Header (requires admin access) ✅
 * This may also involve moving constituent tabs of the header, I'm not sure ✅
 * Decide where to redirect to at Wikipedia:Introduction 2 (which currently redirects to the historical version, but we might want to redirect to Help:Introduction if anything links to it). ✅
 * Move Introduction 3 to Introduction (historical)/3, then decide where to redirect the original page to, since to WP:I2. ✅
 * Redirect constituent pages of the tutorial such as Tutorial/Citing sources to their new counterparts (e.g. Help:Introduction to referencing with Wiki Markup/1). The original pages could be preserved at a historical version if we want. ✅
 * I'm not sure if this is the right place to comment, but the tab subpages (e.g. Introduction/Tab2) have 150+ transclusions in multiple namespaces. They were recently modified, breaking every page in which they were transcluded. I reverted that change to unbreak the pages, and the pages have since been changed to have a bunch of red links on them, breaking their documentation. And now they are being substed by and maybe others. Since these pages are effectively templates, there should be a TfD or MfD to determine if they should be redirected, substed, or kept in place. – Jonesey95 (talk) 23:36, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
 * hello! Hope you're well. That's the only substitution I've done. AnotherBeliever's reverted it pending the discussion at Wikipedia talk:Introduction/TabsTop. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 23:53, 23 April 2020 (UTC)
 * My intention with the above RfC was that redirecting WP:I and WP:T to Help:I included redirecting the subpages of WP:T to their counterparts in the Help:I series. Although looking at it now I realize I never stated that explicitly, Moxy did in the first support !vote, and my sense is that that is what has been agreed upon. The discussion was never formally closed since it was SNOWy, but since you're pretty uninvolved, if you'd like to do that it would be welcome. Overall, this is already hugely complicated as a technical matter, and I'd prefer not to reintroduce editorial hurdles as well unless it's really necessary. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 03:07, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I'm flexible as long as there is no more breaking or substitution of working transclusions of subpages. That was pretty unpleasant. – Jonesey95 (talk) 03:29, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * (The third commented on my talk.) What do you think of moving the tab subpages to the "(historical)" titles and letting the redirects be? Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 00:50, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Again, it's fine with me as long as it does not break transclusions. – Jonesey95 (talk) 14:16, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I just went through the constituent pages of the tutorial and redirected the remaining ones to their new counterparts. So it looks like we're (hopefully) done here. Thanks everyone for all the work put into this! &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 09:12, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Not necessarily. So ... these move requests I posted on WP:RMTR ... some of them were performed without redirects being left behind. This may be a problem since the titles at the old "Wikipedia:Historical"/"Wikipedia:Tutorial" titles, as far as I last check, still have incoming links and/or transclusions. My understanding was that the redirects should remain until all incoming links and transclusions were bypassed, especially considering the issues that were brought up by other editors after the links to the old titles were changed over to the historical titles prior to the pages being moved. Steel1943  (talk) 15:39, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, those links were the ones I went through. They had all been moved to the historical version with nothing left behind in most cases. I checked both the historical and original location for important links, and then redirected the original location to its successor page in the Help:Intro series in all but two cases, where I redirected to the historical version (for the summary page) or to WP:Why create an account? (for the registration page). &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 16:52, 30 April 2020 (UTC)
 * The talk pages appear to have mostly gotten redirected to WP:Help:Introduction at some point, which seems good enough (hopefully the originals are at the historical version? Not 100% sure they all survived...). And I didn't pay attention to the sandboxes, but hopefully they don't have any important incoming links, and perhaps a bot will come through and take care of redirecting them at some point. It's not a huge loss if they just sit and fade into obscurity. &#123;{u&#124; Sdkb  }&#125;  talk 17:02, 30 April 2020 (UTC)