User talk:HaithamS (WMF): Difference between revisions

Project news

• Progress on the help redesign fellowship continues apace. In-person usability testing is due to start next week, watch this space for results!
• A large survey about help pages was conducted. Responses are still coming in, but preliminary results are available.
• A new gadget has been proposed to make it easier for new- and non-editors to leave feedback about help pages. Please test it and leave your thoughts.
• In somewhat-related-project-news: the Teahouse has wrapped up its pilot phase with an extensive report. Planning and discussion is underway for phase 2.
• A discussion is taking place about the purpose and future of the venerable Community portal.

From the editor

Hello from the Help Project, and welcome to the second issue of our newsletter!

The biggest project I've been working on this month has been a large survey of users to find out what they think of our current help pages. Preliminary results from this are now available, although there are more responses trickling in from the lower edit count groups since a batch of email invitations were recently sent out. Finalised results and further analysis should be posted next week.

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

the wub "?!" 18:45, 29 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Tasks

• Calling all CSS and template gurus: Help:Diff and {{wiki diff}} need to be updated to match the new MediaWiki diff styles.
• Why not wander through the lower reaches of Wikipedia:Help Project/page statistics and see if there are pages that can be cleaned up or merged.

Project news summary

• Final results and conclusions from the help pages survey were released.
• The wub gave a presentation at Wikimania 2012 about help pages, and the slides are now on Commons.
• A discussion is taking place about the purpose and future of the venerable Community portal.
• New designs for tutorial pages have been proposed, comment from project members is welcome.

From the editor

Welcome to the (slightly delayed) third issue of the Help Project newsletter.

The past month has once again been a busy one for my fellowship. The full results and conclusions from the extensive user survey on help pages are now available, and make interesting reading. These do confirm a number of our suspicions about Wikipedia help, and suggest that the current plan for the remainder of the fellowship is a sound approach.

Also last month I was fortunate enough to attend Wikimania 2012 in Washington DC, where I gave a presentation about help pages and the aforementioned survey results. You can find the slides from this on Commons. Wikimania was also a great opportunity for many discussions with staff and community members, and these brought up some interesting ideas which I hope to follow up on.

One of the things much discussed was the planned tutorial pages. I've been working on a new design for them which can be seen at User:The wub/sandbox/1, please let me know what you think (especially if you spot any bugs!).

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

the wub "?!" 13:22, 3 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Project news summary

• The in-person usability tests from the wub's community fellowship have been written up.
• Three new introductory tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia.
• The Article Feedback Tool has been deployed to pages in the Help namespace, and can be added manually to help pages in other namespaces. Read more...
• Page statistics were updated for the month of August.

From the editor

Hi, and welcome to the fourth issue of the Help Project newsletter.

It's been another busy month in the world of Wikipedia help. The results from the in-person usability tests conducted as part of the help pages fellowship have been released. There are no great surprises here, the tests confirmed that people have trouble with the existing help system, and people looking for help on the same topic often end up at wildly different pages. Editors who experienced a tutorial and/or edited a sandbox as part of their learning were noticeably more confident when editing a real article.

Drawing on that, three new "Introduction to" tutorials for new users have been created: referencing, uploading images and navigating Wikipedia. These join the popular existing introductions to policies and guidelines and talk pages. Feel free to edit them, but please do remember that the idea is to keep them simple and as free from extraneous details as possible. All three have been added to Help:Getting started, which is intended to be the new focal point for new editors, and will also be seeing a redesign soon.

In other news, the Article Feedback Tool (AFT) can now be used to collect feedback on help pages. By default it has been deployed to all pages in the Help: namespace. It can be disabled on any page by adding Category:Article Feedback Blacklist, or enabled for pages in other namespaces by adding Category:Article Feedback 5 Additional Articles. Once a page has AFT applied, you can add feedback using the form which appears at the bottom of it. Feedback can be reviewed by clicking "View feedback" in the sidebar, or the "Feedback from my watched pages" link at the top of your watchlist.

I'm now entering the final month of my fellowship, and will be focusing my efforts on making much needed improvements to Help:Contents, the main entrance point to our help system. It's been a pleasure working as a fellow, and I just want to thank all the people who have helped me or offered advice over the past months. That definitely won't be the end of my involvement in the Help Project though, I'll be sticking around as a volunteer and continuing to write this newsletter.

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

-- the wub "?!" 20:00, 7 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Project news summary

• Help:Contents and Wikipedia:Contact us have seen a major revamp.
• Page statistics were updated.
• Alerts are now available for discussions related to Help Project pages
• Many more Help Project pages now have the Article Feedback Tool (v5) enabled.
• GettingStarted is an experimental feature to guide new users with their first edits.

From the editor

Hello again from the Help Project!

In the last newsletter (which was quite a while ago sorry!) I talked about my fellowship and the plans for improving the main portal page, Help:Contents. Well I'm sad to say that my fellowship is now over, but very happy to say that the proposed improvements to that page have been completed and implemented. Do check it out if you haven't already.

Another important and frequently used help page, Wikipedia:Contact us, has also seen a significant revamp. You may recognise the design inspiration from the new tutorial pages.

In project news, we now have a subscription to the "article alerts" service. Any deletion nominations, move discussions, or requests for comments on pages within the Help Project's scope will now show up at Wikipedia:Help Project/Article alerts. So that's definitely a page which project members might want to watch.

Any comments or suggestions for future issues are welcome at Wikipedia:Help Project/Newsletter. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter on your talk page in future then just edit the participants page and add "no newsletter" next to your name.

-- the wub "?!" 23:34, 13 January 2013 (UTC)[reply]