Help:Improving help pages

Thanks for your interest in helping out with Help pages! Please read the guide below to get started.

What are Help Pages?
Wikia Community Central is where we create and maintain our Help Pages, which can be accessed from anywhere on Wikia (we recommend you, where you can find other kinds of help, too). It's maintained by both Wikia Staff and the community.

How can you help?
We aim to keep these as a clear, concise, and easily used set help pages. Here are some ways you can help out:


 * If you see someone asking a question on a Help talk page, please answer it the best you can and direct them to our for more support.


 * If you see typo or something that's clearly inaccurate, you can edit the page to improve it. (Please follow the guidelines below, and only edit if you're sure you know what it needs.)


 * If you see a page that needs deeper updates and you're not the right person to take care of it directly, add the category "Out of date help" to the page. This will make it appear in the list at the bottom of this page so that someone else can take care of it.


 * If you're an expert user with great editing skills, please familiarize yourself with our Style Guide below and improve our Help Pages whenever you see the opportunity.

What are our content guidelines?
Help Pages Style Guide
 * Short is best. Pages should be 500 words or less.
 * Use simple and straightforward language, avoid complication – even if that means leaving out advanced variations. We also aim to be warm and engaging without being trite or talking down to people.
 * If there are three ways to do something, then choose the most important or common. Any alternatives should be on a subpage to avoid confusion.
 * All pages should include photos whenever possible. Screenshots are an excellent way to illustrate guides.
 * Screenshots should be from a neutrally themed wikia (the default Wikia skin is best) unless the skin color or Monobook skin is part of what is being shown.
 * Screenshots should be added to the page at approximately 300px (or 620px for a full-width image) and should show just the area necessary to explain.
 * MediaWiki extensions (not specific to Wikia) and complex help on MediaWiki features should be left on rather than included here.
 * You can find a standard page here.

What are the standard sections of a Help Page?
A typical Help Page should look something like this:



In other words, a page should have...
 * A clear introduction that briefly defines the subject of the article
 * Step-by-Step instructions for use
 * Clear screenshots that illustrate the subject of the help page
 * Links to related help pages for further reading
 * Links for other ways to get help

If advanced options or additional reference material is needed, create a subpage called "/Advanced" and link to it within the article for further reading.

What pages need updating?
Below is a list of pages categorized as "Out of date help". If you consider yourself an expert user on one of these subjects and can edit according to the Style Guide above, please feel free to update them! When you're done with a page, just remove that category from it, and it will disappear from this list.

 Articles to   allowcachedresults=true category=Out of date help mode=ordered 

Renamed pages
When a help page on this wikia is renamed: So if you rename a help page here, please immediately make its talk page a redirect to the new talk page and transfer any existing content.
 * the old name stops being transcluded and does not create redirects on the wikias that used it, and
 * visitors from wikias that used the old name will still be directed to the talk page for the old name. They should be instantly redirected to the talk page for the new name so that they see and may add to the latest discussion on the subject.

If you come here by following a link on another wikia looking for a talk page and find nothing, check the help page itself; if it redirects, please create a corresponding redirect for the talk page so that others following your route will go straight to the updated talk page.

Linking to Community Central
On any other wikia, links to CC, may they be interwiki links or given by URL, will be converted to a local wiki link, ie pointing to a (mostly nonexistent) page on that wikia, when transcluded through Shared Help.

In order to circumvent this, prepend another interwiki prefix to interwiki links, like homepage:w:, effectively making a detour to another wikia.

It is also advisable to wrap links that send the reader outside his own wikia in the  parser function, so they may find their way back more easily.

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