100% agreement with Léa about help pages. Let's face it, even among native English speakers here, who is really searching an answer in help pages when it's so much more easy to ask someone here on G2G or on Discord, or whatever private channel.
As somebody whose day job largely entails writing documentation which at least 80% of users will never even glance at, I understand the frustration of putting a lot of effort into creating something that most people never use. But what I tell my team is this: "If users mess something up because they didn't bother reading the documentation, then that's their fault. But if we didn't even write the instructions to tell them the right way to do things, then that's our fault."
I also wish that more people, when answering questions on G2G, would point people to the relevant help page. That way, the newbies know that the answer isn't just the way that the person answering the question prefers to do things, but is actually something recommended (or, in some cases, required) by WikiTree. I used to be better at doing that myself (and at making clear the distinction between what the WikiTree help pages say and my own personal preferences). Plus, referencing specific help pages may be the first time that some users even hear that there are help pages, and might motivate some people to read the help pages themselves, intead of expecting other people to do their reading for them.
And I just have to slip in a couple of rants here:
I hate, Hate, HATE it when people keep moving discussions about WIkiTree to Discord (or any other form of communication) instead of here on G2G. All the discussions here are preserved, so the wisdom of the community is preserved within the community. But when discussions get siloed off into other communication tools, then the number of people who can access that stored wisdom drops dramatically. People may just not know about those other discussions, or where to find the tools or services they're on, or how to install or use them. Some tools are banned in certain countries. (Even tools that most people would consider completely harmless.) It all boils down to depriving some (or even most) WikiTreers access to certain information about WikiTree, and I really don't like seeing people deprived of information, especially information they need. (Apparently, my backbrain is from Beta Colony or someplace like that1.)
I also don't trust Discord. Of the hordes of communication tools that I've used over the decades, Discord is the only one that crashed my computer. (I don't mean that Discord crashed. I mean the whole computer crashed, and I had to restart. It's been years since I've actually had a computer crash.)
I also have to say that I really don't understand the thinking that refuses to read the instructions, but expects other people to read the instructions, and then restate them in an email or other message. Why is reading the instructions so much harder than reading messages? (Not to mention that I personally prefer to go to the... [this is inevitable, really, since this is a genealogy web site, but, wait for it...] source.)
The "non merci" I have had so many times from French genealogists I would so much like to have on board of WikiTree has an underlying "c'est trop Américain".... The US cultural model is very showy in WikiTree social interface, like the badges and all this social bling-bling making French people say "Americans are cute, but they never grow up", that kind of things.
There's kind of a vicious circle there. If people think that the culture of WikiTree is "too American" (and I agree), then the solution is for more non-Americans to join WikiTree, because that will, inevitably, change the culture. It will probably never be truly European (although being more European than it is now would be progress), because eventually, it should (and needs to) become a reflection of the culture of the world as a whole: American, French, Brazilian, Japanese, Australian, Indian, and so on. (Then too, there are plenty of Americans who find the badges and bling... distracting at best. Personally, I figure that whatever motivates people is a good thing, so I just don't talk about those aspects that don't appeal to me. And if people put stickers that I consider frivolous on profiles that I manage, I just take them off and don't make a fuss about it.)
Staying away from WikiTree because it's too closely aligned with the culture of a specific country just means that we'd end up with 197 different versions of WikiTree: one for each country. That kind of splintering would make it awfully hard to achieve the goal of a single connected tree for everybody.
- In Barrayar, by Lois McMaster Bujold, Cordelia tells Aral that the first article in the constitution of Beta Colony is, "Access to information shall not be infringed."