WeRelate talk:Help pages

Supporting help [21 August 2012]

Count me in, in some small aspect--Obstinatesnooper 09:53, 21 August 2012 (EDT)

Thank you! I'll add your username to the main page. --Jennifer (JBS66) 17:35, 21 August 2012 (EDT)

Ideas for improving the help pages? [29 August 2012]

The help pages are pretty complex, and it seems that we have similar information copied onto multiple pages. I'm wondering how we should go about improving them. It seems like we need to have a separate set of I'm a newbie - how do I get started pages vs I'm a regular - how do I do complex things pages.

Any thoughts on how we can go about this? Would it help to break up our current set of help pages into smaller "chunks", with each page essentially answering one question?--Dallan 11:32, 29 August 2012 (EDT)

Getting started [31 August 2012]

I am hoping to start reorganizing the help pages next week. Currently help pages are quite long and try to cover everything having to do with a particular topic. Information is repeated whenever the topic seems appropriate. This has lead to nightmarish problems with updates. No one is too sure how many place the info is repeated. DQ and I have talked about changing the format so no information is duplicated. Whenever some topic will be referred to multiple times, it will be given its own help page. This means any particular page will be short and linked to other pages that relate to the topic. So.... instead of naming standards for person pages being repeated everywhere it is relevant, we will have one help page i.e. Help:Naming Standards for Person Pages. This page will be linked to Help:How to Create a Person Page, Help:Renaming Pages, Help:Creating Ancestor pages, Help:Adding a Spouse, etc. Thus, when it becomes necessary to update information, the information will only need be changed in one place not six places.

Also I would like to see a lot of images on the help pages. Screen prints are often more helpful than words.

It is my hope that we can compile the help pages into an ebook that can be given as a gift for donations or sold on Amazon to fund WeRelate.

Comments? Anyone want to volunteer for particular pages?--sq 22:50, 30 August 2012 (EDT)

Dropbox has a nice example of this style of help pages. Also, Wikipedia has a Book Creator tool that could be helpful in the future. Before you begin moving pages, it would be helpful to have an outline of the proposed help pages so we know what is being worked towards. --Jennifer (JBS66) 08:36, 31 August 2012 (EDT)
Thanks, I'll have to look at the those. I agree it would be nice to have an outline to start with but the help pages are so long and disorganized at the moment, I'm not sure how to create a workable outline without first diving in. It might be easier for each writer to start with one area and begin dividing up existing text into sub-pages as we go--kind of a first draft. Each new section could be listed (without hierarchy) by title (I put several at the bottom of the Help TOC a few weeks ago so I wouldn't forget about them). Then, when we have a beginning framework it will be easier to combine redundant pages, see whatever gaps in information we have and reorganize pages into a simpler hierarchy. It might be worthwhile to use Scrivener. You can move sections around and change the hierarchy by dragging titles around. Scrivener files could be stored on dropbox so everyone could adjust the outline and text and then reload into WeRelate. However, everyone involved would need a $40 copy of Scrivener.
Asking everyone to buy Scrivener won't work; probably best to try re-organizing a sample of the help pages and put the result on the sandbox so we can get a feel for what it will look like.--Dallan 09:30, 13 September 2012 (EDT)