Help:Writing Help Pages
Categories: Sysop Help | Project Leader Help
This is a help page on writing help pages. :-)
Contents |
Authoring and Editing
Help pages are primarily edited by Team Members. Substantive changes generally go through the process described on Help:Developing New Rules.
These pages describe community-wide rules and policies and do not frequently change.
WikiTree, as an organization, is responsible for their content. There may be legal liability. For example, if a member writes on a privately-managed page, "Hey, this photo is copyright-free and anyone can use it," WikiTree is not legally-liable for whether or not that statement is correct unless it is pointed out to us by the copyright holder. However, if this same statement appears on an official help page we may be held directly responsible. Therefore, we need to always know what is being said on help pages and confirm that it's correct.
Legal issues aside, this is important for members. Members should be able to trust that what is being said on help pages is correct and up-to-date.
Since it's hard for us to monitor and maintain help guides in different locations and media forms, e.g. pages kept on Google Docs, YouTube videos, etc., we only take this responsibility over wiki help pages here in the "Help:" namespace. All other pages and instructions are not considered official.
Note that the above applies to English language help pages. We need to disclaim responsibility for translated pages.
Categorization and Indexing
Almost all help pages also should go in the main Category:WikiTree Help category.
Most should also go in subcategories such as Category:Categorization Help or Category:Styles and Standards.
Some, such as this page here, should only go in a subcategory, e.g. Category:Sysop Help, because they are only of very specialized interest.
Help Namespace vs. Docs Namespace
Anything that can be public should be public. This page, for example, is only of interest to sysops but nothing here needs to be kept private, so it's on a public page.
Some information should be kept private. This includes technical documentation on the inner workings of WikiTree. It's our policy to keep this private so we don't make things easier for potential hackers. It also includes pages that may refer to individual members involved in conflicts.
Keep in mind that Leaders can see pages in the Docs namespace.
Capitalization
Help page names should be capitalized, e.g. this page is named "Help Pages" instead of "Help pages".
Level two (==) headlines should also use the headline-case capitalization.
Level three (===) sub-headers and below should use sentence-case capitalization, i.e. just capitalize the first word.
This page was last modified 15:54, 7 July 2023. This page has been accessed 579 times.