Talk:Help

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[edit] Onward and upward

This page is looking great! I hope Bill and other box experts can go on improving it. Now that the bright tabular material is here as a first port of call for anyone who hits the "Help" sidebar link or types "help" in the search box, Help:Contents, which currently looks very like it, can gradually become more link-intensive (in the same style as w:Help:Contents). Robin Patterson 01:08, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Getting Answers to Questions

There are a number of channels of communication available on the wiki. They are pretty much standard through out Wikia, and are not unique to this site. Each has its own particular uses, requirements, and I should say, etiquette. If you are not seeing responses it might be because you are placing your comments in places where people don't expect to see them. If people have not set their watch list to include those particular pages, they may not notice that you've left them a message. For example, on your user page, as opposed to your talk page. Alternatively, if you've set your watch pages to monitor a particular location, you may not see a response because they've placed it somewhere that you are not monitoring.

Some clarification may be useful to help you navigate through the different channels. (I will add that I suspect that this system has simply evolved over the course of development of the underlying wikimedia program. This might be a bit awkward, but it is what it is.)

• Water Cooler---This is the place to bring up general issues of broad interest. People also use it to ask specific questions. Back and forth discussions are placed here, and you can follow the ideas presented by different people with moderate ease.

• Article Talk/Discussion page---each article written has a subpage for discussion. It is used to discuss items that come up, alternative views, etc, in association with the article itself.

• User page---Everyone who registers gets one. People who don't register get one too, but it's not likely to be used if they choose to remain anonymous. Its rather awkward to be addressing "good ol' 176.45.67.003". User pages are intended primarily for your personal use, to either tell people something about yourself, or to use it as a place to organize your activities on the site. It is not intended as a place to ask questions, etc.

• YOUR User talk page---This is a subpage of your user page. It is intended as a place for people to leave YOU messages. If you place a question here, or respond to someone's message at this location, they may or may not see your question, or your response. It depends on how they've set their personal preferences.

• SOMEONE ELSE's User talk Page---You can leave comments for someone else here. They will probably respond on your user talk page, though sometimes respond directly---but then you might be notified about their response. It is not a perfect system, and this is an awkward part of the Wiki approach.

• Email---if you want to talk to someone privately you can use the email link on the sidebar (maybe elsewhere, depending on how you've adjusted your personal settings for working on this wiki). This only works if they have enable "emailing" in their preferences. If they haven't, this won't work.

• Report A Problem---also in the sidebar. If you see a problem with the way the system is behaving, then you can report it here. I find that most (but not all) things that look like problems are because I'm not doing something right. But on rare occasions I do find a bug, and I have made requests for certain changes that they've either carried out, or not, depending on what they thought was needed.

• Live Wiki Help---you can chat live with the folks at Wikia Central (so to speak). Unless there's something heavy going down, they're happy to answer questions (well, they're always happy to help, but sometimes they get swamped---as when they are installing a new version of the underlying programming---and so no one is listening.) Most of the folks who chat on Wikia Central are quite tactful, and almost always helpful---if its within their power. In general, try to emulate their level of professionalism.