Help:About help pages
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 | This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of BattleTechWiki's norms and practices. It is not one of BattleTechWiki's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
 | This page in a nutshell: This is a general information page about BattleTechWiki's help system. For the primary "help page", see Help:Contents. |
Contents
About the help system[edit]
The help resource system of BattleTechWiki consists of a wide variety of how-to and information pages, written to differing levels of technical expertise and in widely varying styles. This variety however has its flaws: it is easy to navigate to a page that regurgitates the same information, contains concepts that have not already been covered, is overly complicated for one's needs, or pages with a listing of links to other pages with listings of links. Information is also spread over a variety of namespace prefixes.
- The BattleTechWiki:Project namespace (prefix BattleTechWiki:): contains many types of pages connected with the BattleTechWiki project itself: information pages, guidelines (e.g., BattleTechWiki:Manual of Style), and how-to pages (e.g., BattleTechWiki:Purge).
- The policy Namespace (prefix Policy:): is exactly that BTW's policies (e.g., BattleTechWiki:Editing policy),
- The Help namespace (prefix Help:): contains pages which provide help in using BattleTechWiki and its software, both for users of the encyclopedia and for editors (e.g., [[Help:References]). However the BattleTechWiki namespace also contains many help style pages that in some cases contain repeated information or more detailed information. For example, Help:Managing files are help pages located in different prefixes covering some of the same information presented in differing levels of technical expertise. There are also pages that have completely different styles of presenting the same information (e.g., Help:Redirect and Help:Shortcut). For this reason redirects and hatnotes are often set up between these two namespaces.
How to utilize help[edit]
Where to start for new editors[edit]
If you would like to get a good overview of the whole project and how it works, you could read through the introductory page at BattleTechWiki:The perfect article or go through the tutorial at Help:Create a New Article. Help:Getting Started contains a listing of introductions and tutorials on the various aspects of BattleTechWiki.
[edit]
- Help:Contents is the main help page that will guide you in the right direction.
- Frequently asked questions are listed by general topic at BattleTechWiki:FAQ (great place for fast info).
- Category:BattleTechWiki information pages and Category:BattleTechWiki how-to are the main subcategories listing help pages.
Interactive assistance[edit]
- You can ask for help on using BattleTechWiki at the Requests for comment and our official Discord.
- General information questions about BattleTech itself can be asked at the reference desk.
Contributing to the help pages[edit]
Like articles, most of the help pages can be edited – so feel free to improve any pages you come across. When a high traffic page has been protected to help prevent vandalism, suggestions can still be made on the talk page.