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This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 19 February 2017 by IsobelJ. |
Editing guides are something people have told us they want to see on the wiki. Up until now we haven't done a particularly good job with editing guides: we've only really had user made guides, which tend to be hidden away and not updated. However we can do better!
Myself and Gaz have made a start on creating some new guides. The intention is for the wiki to have a set of comprehensive guides, located in the RuneScape namespace, which the editing community as a whole can contribute to. So far we have made some basic guides on editing pages in the VisualEditor and Source Editor and creating images. At this point we are bringing the project to the yew grove so that more people can (hopefully) get involved. There is still plenty to do:
- Review the content of the guides so far.
- Create more guides e.g. for more advanced editing, getting around things like the yew grove and talk pages.
- I made a template ({{Template:SE guide}}) to use for more advanced editing guides, telling people to switch to Source Mode editor. I think that we should encourage people to use source mode as much as possible (we have 3 guides that explain how to do some basic editing in VisualEditor but I don't think we need to cover how to use it beyond this).
- Turn RuneScape:Editing into some sort of overall landing type page.
- Make sure people are able to find the guides (open to suggestions on this).
IsobelJ
19:17, January 6, 2017 (UTC)
Discussion
"Make sure people are able to find the guides" - we discussed this in Discord a little, but we could consider replacing the poll on the main page with a short intro on editing and the community, similar to the "Help, policies and guidelines" box Wowpedia has at the bottom of their main page. That would probably mean taking the Editing column out of the "RuneScape Wiki" section and reorganizing it.
"Turn RuneScape:Editing into some sort of overall landing type page" - we could do something like the grid on the previous main page that used {{Portal-links}}? I'm trying to work something out right now. --Iiii I I I 20:31, January 6, 2017 (UTC)
- Doing something with the mainpage would be good and I like what you've done with RuneScape:Editing so far. Some other things I've considered are adding a link into the welcome message and adding a link when you click to edit a page - similar to the "formatting help" link that shows while you're writing a comment on Reddit - if that is at all possible.
IsobelJ 10:23, January 7, 2017 (UTC) - "(...) we could consider replacing the poll on the main page (...)" - Do I understand this correctly? What you propose is to remove the poll from the main page altogether? Without a separate discussion? 5-x Talk 13:20, January 8, 2017 (UTC)
- This is the discussion. Is there policy I'm not aware of that requires a separate forum for replacing the main page poll? --Iiii I I I 19:57, January 8, 2017 (UTC)
KISS - I think this is a great idea, but usually editing guides quickly become really long articles. I think the only way to get people more involved by using guides, is to make the guides as short as possible, with only key information. People basically only need to know how to use wikitables/dotted lists/wikilinks, update infoboxes, or add navboxes and categories. The rest can be in a more advanced guide (references, creating articles, making/editing images, editing templates). And perhaps some user-made guides that are currently in the User: space can be moved to the RS: space as a new subpage of RS:Editing. JOEYTJE50TALK pull my finger 17:57, January 8, 2017 (UTC)
- Joey brings up good points. I believe most people will start rather small and so just need a very small beginners guide to get going. Overwhelming them with one comprehensive but detailed guide may send them running. Of course, I mostly speak to how I react to things, but I think I am a good example of a noob editor.
- As for replacing the poll with the info box, sure. If people miss it bad enough we can bring it back later. Degenret01 (talk) 17:21, January 9, 2017 (UTC)
- As a new editor myself, I would have loved a short, simple guide to get me started since I had zero knowledge of how the wiki worked edit-wise. When I started editing I didn't really have any intention of staying around to make more edits (in fact I didn't even bother creating an account at first) but as new content came out and the wiki took awhile to be updated, I find myself looking into more stuff I'd like to help with. To that end, I already started reading through some of the guides that are in progress and have them bookmarked for reference.
- This being said I think Joey is correct, a short to-the-point guide (perhaps with a link on the homepage) is likely best for the majority of new editors. If new editors plan to stick around and get more involved, then there should be more advanced guides for various types of editable content such as infoboxes, calculators, tables, etc. But a full guide that covers everything from text edits to taking/editing images to creating calculators is likely to be overwhelming for the vast majority of first time editors. Suaraun (talk) 03:44, January 10, 2017 (UTC)
- I guess our most basic guides would be Your first edit and VisualEditor basics and Source mode basics, do you guys think these have a good amount of information? IsobelJ 16:36, January 10, 2017 (UTC)
- Those are excellent. Simple but informative, easy to understand. I say no way I could improve those. Degenret01 (talk) 17:09, January 10, 2017 (UTC)
- I guess our most basic guides would be Your first edit and VisualEditor basics and Source mode basics, do you guys think these have a good amount of information?
Comment - I agree with Joey. Keep it simple. A beginner's guide with very basic editing tips and maybe a link to a sandbox for them to play with a bit. Have links to more in depth guides so they can progress. Make the guide link more visible on our Welcome templates. As they are, I think the guides are fairly simple and straight forward. I would've appreciated something like this when I started out. 
Samberen 
04:21, January 10, 2017 (UTC)
Comment(s) (1) For me, even RuneScape:Editing/Your_first_edit is a bit lengthy and "prosey". It is good information, but I wonder if it could be shortened even more to more just a list of steps, rather than a guide in paragraphs and sections? Personally, I don't think it needs all the "Today, I am going to show you how to make your first edit..." type of text. It can be even more concise than it already is, if it is going to be the first thing someone looks at. (2) How would anyone feel about, for more than just "basic" editing, creating tutorials for things like advanced tables, infoboxes, etc in some kind of sandbox format where a user who WANTS to learn these things can follow directions, and make a "practice" version, before editing? Is that even possible?
- REDIRECT User:Myles Prower/Signature 19:04, February 1, 2017 (UTC)
Update - I have made some more advanced editing guides but I’ve now reached the limit of what I am reasonably competent with editing to write about. I also spruced up RuneScape:Maintenance with some new projects that new (and old) editors will hopefully want to get involved with, including a new “project ideas” subpage for a wish list of projects. I’ve tried to make sure both the editing guides and to do list are visible: I put links on the mainpage and the welcome template that gets posted to new users (if the bot ever updates) and changed up the navbar to include more emphasis on the guides/community features. I’m hoping to get a reddit thread out in the next few days as well. I’ll leave this forum open a little longer in case anyone has any final feedback to give, but I’m pretty much done with this for now :) IsobelJ 19:11, February 13, 2017 (UTC)
Closed - done for now. IsobelJ 09:45, February 19, 2017 (UTC)