Forum:Shared Help - new feature!

Good morning! It's time for another feature announcement - today, it's Shared Help :)

Shared Help allows Wikia to show centrally maintained help pages from Help.wikia.com locally on all of Wikia's 9,000 plus wiki communities. The benefit of this system is that every wiki community will have the most up to date help pages without having to leave their wiki.

Starting today, all new wikis created will come with Shared Help pages. Next, we will enable Shared Help on all existing wikis that have the out-of-date "starter" Help namespace. Those of you who have customized your local help pages will be able to choose whether to adopt this new system.

We are trialling this on English wikis, but hope to build up similar help pages for other languages in the future. These will then be available to all non-English wikis in the same way.

If you have yet to see it, the new central Wikia Help is full of great content and documentation on editing tips for newbies, all the features and extensions that are available on Wikia's platform, plus a few best practices guides we've put together. Just like everything else on Wikia, this wiki is open for input from everyone in the community and we are excited to see it grow and become more and more useful to all of Wikia's communities.

For full details on how Shared Help works, please see Help:Shared Help on Wikia Help. 16:23, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Edit: this is not a retroactive change yet (it only affects new wikis for now), and it does not prevent you having local help pages. 18:29, 2 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Yay! I dont need to update the Crash Bandicoot Wiki (it was founded in 2005 and adopted by me). --YOWUZA TALK 2 ME! 17:31, 2 October 2008 (UTC)

Requests
If you are interested in Shared Help for your Wikia, just ask below! Two caveats: you will need to check over the resulting help pages on your wiki, possibly deleting/rewriting local ones; we would prefer to do all recently created wikis at once, so hold off if the wiki started in the past few months. Also note that Help:Contents and Help:Main Page are the main access points for Shared Help. 10:07, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

Spore
I'd like to try this on sporewiki. 14:06, 3 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Given there are prexisting help pages, those will need to be dealt with first. It may be easier to wait until we do it automatically, or you can remove/edit them yourself. Help:Contents is (will be) the main entry point. 16:49, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * The wiki's page list still lists only those existing pages, no mapped pages, so theoretically they can be dealt with after the changeover (because you're still able to find them). --◄mendel► 10:57, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Guild Wars
GuildWiki would like to try that as well - we had all of 5 pages in our help namespace, and they've been (re)moved. --◄mendel► 02:20, 5 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I'll sort that out for you now :) 16:49, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you, it's working fine. --◄mendel► 10:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Shared help stopped working; none of the mapped pages that I checked were visible at all. --◄mendel► 09:09, 18 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Not sure why, but it got switched off for some reason. I've switched it back on :) 18:19, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Xiaolin Showdown
Xiaolin Showdown Wiki could benefit from the shared help feature. I have no problem deleting the existing help pages if it's needed. I've already removed Help:Contents. Jay32183 23:40, 10 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Please do remove the other pages unless they have content specific to your wiki - I can then turn it on :) 20:17, 14 October 2008 (UTC)


 * The Help namespace is now empty. Jay32183 06:53, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Enabled! 18:16, 15 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Thank you! Jay32183 06:51, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Elder Scrolls Fanon
Elder Scrolls Fanon would also like to try this. Our Help namespace is currently out of date, and it sounds like a very helpful feature. I'll now start to delete all articles in the Help namespace. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 14:50, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I've finished deleting all the articles in the Help namespace. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 15:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Enabled! 18:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. It works fine. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 19:03, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

OblivioWiki
The OblivioWiki would also like to try this out. Our Help namespace is nearly non-existant, and I believe Shared Help would help this wiki greatly. I'll now procede to delete all articles in the Help namespace. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 14:50, 11 October 2008 (UTC)
 * I've finished deleting all the articles in the Help namespace. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 15:04, 11 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Enabled! 18:30, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. It works fine. --Michaeldsuarez (Talk) (Deeds) 19:03, 14 October 2008 (UTC)

Guild Wars 2
GuildWiki 2 would also like to try this out. Our help namespace is very small and not all that detailed. I'll delete the help articles now. --Balistic Pve (T/C/E) 22:34, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Language
What about wiki in other languages ? Will the shared help show in the translated name of the help namespace (i.e. Aide in french) ? Will all shared articles be in english only ?

As i undestand, we dont need to remove pages that currently are in help (or Aide) namespace, i'm i misstaking ? — TulipVorlax 21:50, 5 October 2008 (UTC)


 * We are trialing this in English for now. But the plan is to have similar pages for other languages in the future. As with the English version the other language help will be added to new wikis, with existing wikis deciding whether to use the new pages or stay with their local help. -- sannse (talk) 07:44, 6 October 2008 (UTC)


 * No, you don't need to remove pages, but you should not have redirect pages with the same name as central help articles: these redirects will still redirect, and the users can't access the help content.
 * The Help:Contents page has 5 links to the Advice: namespace, which isn't included (on GuildWiki, anyway) &mdash; they link to the central wikia help, though. --◄mendel► 10:54, 7 October 2008 (UTC)

Shared Help and Special:WantedPages
I've noticed that every Shared Help page also appears under Special:WantedPages as it doesn't actually exist on the wiki. Could this please be fixed? immibis 03:07, 31 October 2008 (UTC)


 * As the pages are transcluded content, the articles don't really exist on the wiki. They will only appear as "real" pages if there is local content. I don't know how easy this would be to change, but we can look into it. 05:54, 31 October 2008 (UTC)