User:Stephen Gilbert/Documentation survey

This was my personal survey of Wikipedia's user and contributor documentation in early 2003. This is of historical interest only.

Just a personal survey of our current documentation. Jump in if you like...

Entry points

Wikipedia:Welcome, newcomers
Essentially the same text that Larry wrote a long time ago, but it's aged well. Needs a little more refactoring, esp. the links at the bottom.

Wikipedia:Help
Pretty good layout; not too overwhelming for a newcomer. Linked pages need updating.

Wikipedia:FAQ
Not bad, if I do say so myself. ;-) More re-organizing and migration of old material is needed, esp. with Wikipedia:Contributing FAQ.

Wikipedia:Utilities
Large and sprawling; difficult to navigate. Not really intended for beginners; should be turned into a complete documentation index, leave Help to be the more user friendly document.

Main Page
~~Serves as a documentation portal, but shouldn't.~~
~~Links to Wikipedia:Help, Wikipedia:FAQ, Wikipedia:Mailing lists and Wikipedia:Announcements should be enough.~~
The above no longer applies. The redesigned front page is much better.

Wikipedia:About
~~Pretty bad; just a shotgun blast of links from the front page. We need a short introduction and a few relevant links.~~
This is also much better now...

Wikipedia:Intlwiki-L -- should probablybe redirected to Wikipedia:Mailing lists
Wikipedia:What Google likes
Wikipedia:Contributing to Wikipedia
...and also Wikipedia:How to add content to Wikipedia with minimal effort. Maybe these two should be merged.
Wikipedia:Dealing with vandalism
Wikipedia:Edit conflicts
Wikipedia:Friends of Wikipedia
This is Larry's old project. He looked at all the refering URLs in the logs and tried to keep track of them all. This page should be more selective; it needs heavy pruning.
Wikipedia:How to be neutral when taking sides
A good page, but needs editing to be a little less personal (use of first person, etc).
Wikipedia:How to explore Wikipedia

Many of these are historically interesting and should be archived

The vaguelly current stuff has been put in Wikipedia:Nupedia and Wikipedia, the historical stuff has been moved to meta