WikiThing topics that need to be moved to HelpThing topics

In another thread, rsterling brought up that a lot of WikiThing topics probably need to be somehow moved over to HelpThing. Leaving aside for the moment the technical details of how that would be best accomplished (Jeremy is looking into that with Casey), maybe it would be helpful to get a good list together of topics that clearly need migration. (Update: Jeremy says: "Ok, Casey's going to set it so that anything with the {{HelpThing}} in it indexes to the HelpThing section. So whew, no need for moving things, we can concentrate on fleshing out/updating/&c." So while no need to move things, I think there's still plenty of consolidation and moving information to existing HelpThing topics that can be done as mentioned below.)

This could also include overlapping ones, like these two about Series that should probably merge into a single HelpThing entry:

HelpThing:Series
WikiThing Series

I'll try to keep on top of the thread and update this first post with a listing of what's mentioned downthread.

Another Update: As discussions have progressed below, the idea has moved away from moving/merging things into just HelpThing entries and towards avoiding overlapping topics when they aren't necessary.

Wow you're fast, I was just coming to update this thread :-)

So let's have some discussion about these.

"HelpThing:Series" is about the Series page: what shows up on it, etc. "WikiThing Series" is about the Series field/feature. It defines what counts as a series in more detail (and probably predates the Helpthing page for the series page).

"Series" as a feature and concept is bigger than the Series page, and is a subset of the Common Knowledge feature. The information on what is and isn't a series needs to be available from several different places on the site: sometimes perhaps the text needs to be duplicated, and other times it just needs to be linked. So, for instance, the "series" definition needs to be linked from the "works" help page and from the "common knowledge" help pages.

I think there's a case to be made for having some general "concept" pages - work, series, etc. that can be linked to from other pages.

Right, but I don't understand WHY the WikiThing Series should be about the field/feature. The only two entry points I can find for Series are the the Help link on the top-right of the Series page and the "Common Knowledge help page" link at the top of the Common Knowledge section on work pages. Of course, neither of those link to
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Series

Interestingly enough, the only pages that do link to
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Series
are
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Profile/Stats/Series
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/History_of_LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Site-wide_search
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Work/Commonknowledge

Which just uncovers another peculiar discrepancy:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Knowledge
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Work/Commonknowledge

I understand that one is about CK in general and one is about CK as it applies to Work, but the overlap is pretty large. There also doesn't appear to be a CK as it applies to Authors page. And the "Common Knowledge help page" on the works page doesn't point to the HelpThing:Work/Commonknowledge page but rather points to the main Common_Knowledge entry.

I think a lot of this has to do with what you mentioned before with the evolution of HelpThing growing out of the existing WikiThing base. I think a lot of these things would probably be structured differently if actually trying to design it a coherent layout from scratch.

I wonder, does WikiThing support the ability to basically #include another wiki page/section? I wonder if this might be a way to avoid having the same text duplicated in multiple places and just have different ones yank the information in as they need it?

I think part of it is that HelpThing may need more of a solid design. Is it just the pages that the "Help" button links to, or is it the entire Help system for LT? To me, the latter makes sense, which is why I would think that all the Help for CK would fit in HelpThing better than scattered around WikiThing. But I understand there are issues with history and stuff so some of this is just musing.

Some consolidation, streamlining, or redirection needed:

Common_Knowledge
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Common_Knowledge
HelpThing:Work/Commonknowledge
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Work/Commonknowledge

The first of those is the main CK explanation page, and is much more developed, and continues to be updated. The second was only edited once. So whatever happens, I think we should prioritize the more developed page, and edit the less developed one accordingly either to point to that page or to make it redirect there in some way.

5 Ha - cross posting on that exact point. Great minds...

;)

At some point, I'm going to try to map out what all pages there are for the CK-related stuff (and which link to context-sensitive links on pages versus ones that are purely links from OTHER topics). Would help to get an idea of what's actually out there. It's so hard to get a good picture of the whole thing. Wish there was some neat automated mapping software for it.

As I understand it, HelpThing was designed to be a way to automatically link to a help page for every LT page. So the www.librarything.com/zeitgeist page would link to the helpthing:zeitgeist page and whenever Tim added a new page, a HelpThing page would automatically be added so that members could fill it in right away and the developers wouldn't have to worry about it. However, I think there were some problems with the concept, like structure of LT page names not being conducive to automatically creating names for the HelpThing pages. And when Tim redoes some area he sometimes renames all the pages and the old help gets stranded.

So to answer your question, HelpThing was designed to only be for the help that corresponds to a LT page. And I'm not sure adding pages to it that don't correspond to existing pages is a good idea because they might conflict with a page that is automatically added in the future when Tim adds some new LT page. (Although I'm not positive the automatic adding of help pages is being done anymore).

8> Well, rsterling gave a good example here of a Help link that links to a non-existent page, so I'm not too worried about that:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/112112#2579021

It's also been my experience that it's fairly trivial for Tim to link the Help link to a different HelpThing topic.

So I'm still not convinced that HelpThing should be only for things that a Help link (especially only a top-right Help link) goes to. Would be nice to hear some official comment.

So I'm still not convinced that HelpThing should be only for things that a Help link
Nor am I, and though those automatically generated pages were a big part of the HelpThing feature when it launched, there are some features that need a help page but don't have an obvious main site "page" of their own to link from (Collections, for instance). So I think HelpThing can and should include a wider range of pages than just the automatically generated ones. The automatically generated and linked pages need to be further fleshed out, though, and we could do more to link all the pages together more systematically and clearly.

Right, part of the problem is that "Help" for LT is scattered all over the place, which is the opposite of helpful. I'd like to have it centralized in HelpThing so that there's one place where people can go to find Help, and while that may take some doing, I think in the long run it will be a good thing.

Does that make sense, or no?

To answer my own question from earlier, it's pretty darn simple to include one page in another (and some of you probably already knew that). They call it transclusion. It's pretty much just like doing templates. For example, here:

http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:Brightcopy

Is actually just:
This is a transclusion test. Following this should be some Series text.

{{HelpThing:Series}}

This seems like it might be a good way to clean up some of these topics and get a single source point for the text. Like having a description for "What is a series?" that can show up on the Help-link for the Series page, the link for Common Knowledge, etc.

12. Cool. Maybe what would be good, then, is a definitions page for various concepts, with very short and sweet definitions that we can then replicate across the other help pages. Thoughts?

11> It makes a lot of sense to me, but I'm just repeating myself. I see it as this way:

HelpThing: All the help for how to use LibraryThing, the website, edited by the LT staff and LT members

WikiThing: Personal and Community projects and pages (though "personal" is a little bit of a misnomer, since anyone is able to edit anything, even if it would be a bit rude). These can be projects relating to LibraryThing specifically (like a list of all the Publisher Series descriptions until we can convince Tim to add the field) or just general book-ish stuff that's cool to have here.

I am fundamentally against moving stuff from mainspace into the HelpThing namespace.

The reason that 'concept' descriptions should remain in mainspace is so that people can just put the wikimarkup [[]] around common terms in text without having to worry about using the namespace name to direcct them to HelpThing. The reason that linkage to the Series page is poor is just that people aren't used to editing in a wiki (which does take a conceptual shift).

>12 brightcopy:

I am implacably against transclusion: once you've transcluded something, any change to the original is never picked up, thereby losing the capability that you were looking for. Templates are the way to go if you are going to choose this way of doing things, but that misses the whole point of a wiki. You don't need to repeat the explanation if it can be accessed by the click of a link. What you do need to do is make your explanations (your basic wiki pages describing the low-level details) very atomic so that people get into the habit of clicking the link whenever they want the more detailed explanation.

The change in mindset is quite difficult, and LT has a very small community with which to generate the necessary approach that is needed for a true community wiki. I work for a massive company, and our in-house wiki is appalling (basically because we don't use MediaWiki, in my opinion).

ETA ... removal of my rant about transclusion because I got it the wrong way round. (Thanks brightcopy.) I can only blame it on late-night posting and a particularly bad experience with templates in the past.

>8 jjwilson61: and >9 brightcopy:

I think if we're going to reposition HelpThing so that it's no longer page/context-specific help, then that needs to be an open discussion involving more people than those who join this group. I speak as someone who did create a lot of page-specific help, only to see it stranded. If it was simple to redirect help links, then I'm not sure why this wasn't done often in the past.

If anything, I think we need smaller context-sensitive blocks (and standard links for the naming), so that the whole page doesn't have to be covered in one HelpThing page. Many companies use context smaller than one whole page for context-sensitive help. Ideally, the authors of HelpThing would click on every Help/question mark link, and if there wasn't a HelpThing page created already, then start one. That's how I worked at the beginning, but a lot of pages went through changes. I must have changed Author_gallery and its variants quite a few times, which involved not only moving the one page, but changing all the references. When the site changes structure or page naming, it can invalidate significant work.

I'm not averse to general concepts pages on HelpThing or links to concepts pages on WikiThing, but Tim's original HelpThing template did include a heading for brief concept description, and I think a short description is helpful, with a link to more info. Some people want bite-size explanations on a page without having to navigate to another link (potentially getting a bit lost in the process.) Similarly, there is room for both context-sensitive help and hierarchical pages for overall concepts.

15> The reason that 'concept' descriptions should remain in mainspace is so that people can just put the wikimarkup

Ugh. So here I thought it was smart enough for links to be relative to the current namespace you're in. Bleh. I implemented TWiki (with a lot of custom code) at my office and that's how it behaves. Craziness. Thanks for weighing in on that. This actually just makes me question having the HelpThing namespace AT ALL. Because you still have to put "HelpThing:" in all those topics even inside HelpThing. I'd almost be in favor of doing away with the namespace and just having the "{{HelpThing}}" be inserted in anything you want to have indexed as Help. Why bother with the namespace?

An alternative to transclusion is substitution, whereby the current content of the template is automatically copied into the wikitext of the target page on saving, and will then be independent of any later changes made to the template. The syntax for this is {{subst:Template name}}

I am implacably against transclusion: once you've transcluded something, any change to the original is never picked up, thereby losing the capability that you were looking for.

I think you're thinking of "substitution", not "transclusion." Here's what it says at the link I gave earlier:
An alternative to transclusion is substitution, whereby the current content of the template is automatically copied into the wikitext of the target page on saving, and will then be independent of any later changes made to the template. The syntax for this is {{subst:Template name}}

I just verified it by transcluding {{:History_of_LibraryThing}} here:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/User:Brightcopy

I made a change to the history page and saved it. Next time I loaded my user page, that change was reflected.

I hear you on saying you don't want to repeat information, but it's a fine balance. You don't always want to have to keep leaving the page you are on sometimes, like if someone was reading all about common knowledge. Theoretically, many sections (Series, Canonical Title, People/Character Names, etc.) could be links off to some other page. But it's a lot nicer to see them altogether and a lot better experience for someone coming to the topic without already knowing the information.

I think this is also a bit key here at LT since the features change stuff a good deal. I've already seen all the different places I need to update to take into account that we now have a Publisher Series field and not just the lowercase term "publisher series."

16> I think if we're going to reposition HelpThing so that it's no longer page/context-specific help, then that needs to be an open discussion involving more people than those who join this group.

I agree 100%. But I'm not sure of a way to get them involved in a discussion that's any easier than "hey, if you're interested in HelpThing/WikiThing, come participate in this group." Know what I mean? You could throw it out in Talk about LibraryThing or RSI to get lost in the whitenoise, but I'm not sure that'd really be an improvement. Maybe a post in TaLT to tell people to pop by?

I think it's one thing to talk about minor changes, or coordinating efforts. Those are nitty-gritty topics for the worker-bees as it were. It's another to completely change how HelpThing works. People who might not be interested in joining this group to help contribute might still want to express an opinion as a user of Help on how HelpThing should be structured as a whole. If it takes multiple posts in Talk about LT or RSI, and it might not get past the "whitenoise" for everyone, but I still think it's worth the attempt for such a major change.

19> Just FYI, you don't have to either join or watch this group to post. Plus, as pointed out in 15/17, the namespace problems make it unlikely that things would be moved over to HelpThing namespace. I'm wondering if it might be easier on everyone to abolish the HelpThing namespace altogether. Thoughts?

Whether a group is open to post or read and whether it actually gets seen are two very different things, depending on how people view Talk. The presence of a link in one thread in a large group doesn't necessarily give a thread in a small group sufficient visibility (since some people only follow some groups, threads, etc.)

conceptDawg created HelpThing *specifically* for context-sensitive help. Tim eventually (reluctantly) went along, even saying up front he expected it not to work well. Several of us made heavy contributions early on, but changes to the site structure left content no longer relevant or stranded without a link, particularly since the WikiSearch excluded this content by default. The site structure and features have now stabilized considerably. In other words, the original concept is less risky again.

Making sure non-context-sensitive Help (a coherent layout of topics) is included somewhere on the wiki and improving links is important. But honestly I think getting caught up in namespaces and syntax is missing the big picture, the use cases. How do people currently access help? How would they like to access it? What content do they need? Are they looking for answers about this page in front of them, general questions, or both? Do they want to keep navigating a bunch of links, or do they want quick answers? (My experience based on watching many years of questions in Talk is that sometimes members need one or the other, and there are benefits to each. Brief text with lots of links should not be assumed optimal a priori.) There have been a lot of visits to HelpThing pages even despite not showing up on search. Making HelpThing searchable increases access, but entry points other than the Help link can also can cause people (wiki editors and users) to forget that each HelpThing page corresponds to ONE PAGE and its fields, with no hierarchy *by design*, and if fields appear on multiple pages there may be duplication of content. In an ideal world, help would be truly context-specific at the field rather than page level, but that's not likely to happen given other priorities.

WikiThing has a long tradition of housing information about general concepts/broad features, and some HelpThing pages have links between the two types of information. I believe it's important to preserve options for navigation/pathways helpful to the needs of multiple types of users, no matter what the structure of the namespaces or syntax is underneath it.

>21 WalkerMedia: - "I believe it's important to preserve options for navigation/pathways helpful to the needs of multiple types of users, no matter what the structure of the namespaces or syntax is underneath it."

Very true. I don't think anybody's disagreeing with that!

I'm coming at this from a "we get flack about how hard our Help system is to new members" front. Some of it is prioritization (LTFL probably shouldn't be the main heading on the front page of the wiki), some of it will be helped by the ability to search (more of it will be helped by putting {{HelpThing}} into the Help pages to they get indexed as search.

It may be that there's actually no need to "centralize" things, but rather just to do some slight shifting around, adding links and {{HelpThing}}, and increasing visibility. What say you?

21> Just FYI, I've already been convinced through the discussions here that moving anything to other namespaces is dead in the water (as I mentioned earlier). So I think the participation here has been really helpful. And when Jeremy found we could put {{HelpThing}} in to get pages to be considered part of the help system for indexing, I think that answered a lot of questions about how to partition "that which is help" from "that which is community/personal projects". I wish there was a bit clearer distinction (like maybe some styling or something), but it's not a huge deal.

To add on to what Jeremy has said, I think there needs to be some better "table of contents" style organization so it's easier for a new user (or existing ones who want to catch up on changes) to easily browse the documentation rather than have to approach it in a more scattershot method (find a page, click on it's Help link). This ToC approach is already on some of the pages like the CK one.

I also think there be a lot to gain from trying to avoid overlaps. As has been pointed out, there's a small number of people actually working on the wiki on an ongoing basis. This just causes parts to get out of date and out of sync with other parts. I'd just really like to see something that helps make that easier to avoid, and so I think transclusion is appropriate in places.

Now, back to getting the word out to get people to join the discussions. I was mainly just pointing out you don't have to join or watch because I didn't want people to think that was a requirement. Now, as far as posting multiple thread, I and others have already tried that a few times. Here's a recent one:
http://www.librarything.com/topic/109997

We just did not get many people joining in. That's why I'm trying this. I've already learned for more about it in the last day than I did from most any of those other threads. :) But feel free to go that route if you want the discussion to mainly happen in TaLT or RSI. I'd just like to see something happening; like Jeremy said, the help system is hard for new members. If you're not active on Talk, you miss out on a ton of stuff. I'm just trying to get some momentum going so if nothing else they'll be a lot of updating pages and fixing old cruft right now so it won't be so out-of-date in a year, two years down the road.

Make sense?

The TOC style of help is here, http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Help_and_FAQ, linked to from the Help/FAQs link at the bottom of every page. Is it that you couldn't find it or do you think it needs improving?

24> No, I've seen that. It wasn't about a single ToC, it was about the approach of ToCs that can provide an easy path for exploring the system. But that is an example of one that needs a lot of improving, yes.

There's also this:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Category:HelpThing

I think the initial Help and FAQ page could use some improvement. Personally, my eyes glaze over when presented with a long list of bullet points. I also think we could really use an list of frequently asked questions, with answers. all in one place. I didn't actually know until just now that clicking on one of these bullet-pointed items would take me to a list of questions and answers. Maybe rephrasing each of those points on the welcome page as a question would help, or else a little explanatory note below or next to each point, giving a preview of the kind of info one can find by clicking through.

26> Yeah, I agree with the "questions, with answers. all in one place" thing especially. Granted, there are some topics that just aren't simple short one paragraph answers so not everything is going to fit in there. I think part of the focus really needs to be on what is actually a frequently asked question, versus just a topic. Like "How do I change my username?" really IS a question that is frequently asked. "Zotero support" is not an actual question nor is it frequently asked. I understand, this is the Help/FAQ page, not JUST FAQ. But I'm just trying to put into words what I mean. I think FAQs tend to help more for those questions that come up over and over again and not just as a catchall term for any kind of instructions.

On the "Should this be a HelpThing or just a WikiThing topic?" subject, here's an example I ran across:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:Work/Relationships

As far as I know, no actual Help link links here. Jeremy created it, possibly before thinking about the HelpThing/WikiThing divide. But also, it seems like the Work Relationships popup SHOULD link to it.

I did a lot of work on this page, including the screenshots, so it might just be that I skewed the feel of it more towards the page-specific help rather than just about relationships in general. But sometimes it's hard to talk about one without having the other hand-in-hand to show how it's actually used.

>28 brightcopy: - yes, the popup should link to it. I thought it did. I'll make sure it does, soon!

29> Cool, thanks! But I can see how some of that stuff is going to be applicable to the Work page, because that's where relationships are shown. So at some point, that HelpThing page will probably ALSO need the same language in it about each of the relationship types. So it's possible that stuff should be moved out into a separate topic that discusses relationships in a general way and each relationship we have now, and then that topic is transcluded both into the HelpThing link for the Work Relationships popup and the HelpThing link for the Works page. The other option is that a link to it is just stuck in both, but like I said before at some point that simply makes it really hard to follow a document when you're always having to link away from it.

>30 brightcopy:. Heh. Yeah, it's complicated, and there are so many little bits and pieces to it it's very hard to wrap one's head around!

27> FAQs seem to be the lowest common denominator of help where someone just takes all the questions that have been asked and answered on a board and throws them into a file.

An actual set of pages describing how LT works and its basic concepts arranged in a hierarchical fashion would be more useful but also more difficult to create and maintain.

32> An actual set of pages describing how LT works and its basic concepts arranged in a hierarchical fashion would be more useful but also more difficult to create and maintain.

Oh, I agree, and that's what I was trying to get across. Information should be organized and indexed/ToCed, not just jammed together somewhat randomly like often happens in FAQs. I'd prefer FAQs be things like "Why can't I add a book directly to my library by clicking the green plus?" Very specific questions that people are always asking.

ETA: And no, I'm not saying HelpThing/WikiThing is completely unorganized and I realize that this approach is taken to some degree. I'm just stating my opinions on organization in general and looking at how we could strengthen that in places where it falls apart in the existing docs.

I agree with the distinction made in 14>

HelpThing: All the help for how to use LibraryThing, the website, edited by the LT staff and LT members

There are a few reasons for this.

1) It is clearer what goes where - it's instinctual. If it's help, it's HelpThing.
2) It makes searching for help much easier. You don't have to search /everything/ - you can search only help topics.
3) It makes linking easier because there is one place to look for the page, and one consistent mode of linking (rather than trying to decide whether to link to the wiki tag page or the HT tag page).
4) It makes it possible to have a complete index of all help pages, including 'conceptual' ones.

I do understand about wanting to be able to link using just the brackets, but there are some things we can do with templates to make linking a bit easier, I think, and ultimately I think the usability of the system by the end user is of top importance.

I DO agree that there is a place for 'conceptual' pages and that the current HelpThing system leaves these things out. I've created a few smaller ones where it seemed appropriate (colored checkmarks, for example) and think there should be more.

We can do this while still using the page-specific help - you can create a page that isn't reached by any specific page, but only through wiki links (IE, on the page you reach from talk, you get help on that page, but at the very top it might give you a link to a 'concept of talk and groups on LT' sort of page).

For those that are wondering about the point of a separate namespace, the bit about searching is really the only reason I see for it - but searching is a big one. MediaWiki (which is what LT's wiki runs) lets you search by individual namespace - that's why searching in the wiki right now doesn't pick up HelpThing topics, but it's also a way to search /only/ HelpThing topics, and I do think there's significant value in that.

I'm rambling a bit as I try to get caught up on all these things that I'm very interested in. ;)

The final thing I might say is that I think that in addition to out of date, bare, or empty pages, we need to consider LT pages that need to link to a better HelpThing page - that is, many times different pages go to one central HT page (try the 'Help' button from any of your catalog pages, including power edit and tags), which is really frustrating.

I also think we could benefit from a few typical wiki 'tools', like marking our stubs and otherwise using handy templates for organization and the need for updating things. For example, we could throw {{update}} at the top of any page needing an update, and that would automatically put it in a category, so anyone looking to do some updating work can see a list all in one place.

These templates are easy to throw together and I'd be happy to spend some time doing so once we have a good sense of how the group might want to approach such things, and if we'd all find them useful.

>12 brightcopy: Transclusion? Oh dear, I think I might have messed something up for somebody.

35> I'm not sure I fully understand what happened. Should I? But maybe that's a topic for a different thread.

For the sake of another thread I pointed here - to just recap the conclusions I came to (that some people had already come to):

* HelpThing namespace is for pages linked directly to from Help links
* {{HelpThing}} for all things not in the HelpThing namespace but that are still documentation on how the LT website works (rather than things like community projects or general cool book stuff)

I still wish there was some better separation between things in WikiThing that are Help and things that are not, but I think this is the best we can do. I'm thinking maybe we can have some sort of styling that sets the Help pages apart. Any interest in that?

I discovered I had a lot more to say on things so I started a new thread for the topic of how HelpThing works and/or should work that builds off what has been said on this thread. Hope no one minds, but I was afraid of important discussion getting lost!

It's here.

Sounds good to me. I'd be fine with this thread dying as I think it's changed enough that it needs a reboot.

>35 justjim:

No, you did good.