Help:Improving help pages

Thanks for your interest in improving Fandom's help pages! Please read the guide below to get started.

What are help pages?

Fandom Community Central is where we create and maintain our help pages, which can be viewed from anywhere on Fandom via the Shared Help feature. That said, we generally suggest reading them on Community Central where you can find other kinds of help too.

The pages are maintained by both Fandom Staff and the wider 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 or direct them to our community forums or Special:Contact for more support.
• If you see a 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see a page that needs deeper updates, and you're not the right person to take care of it directly, add the category "Out of date help" to the page.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 near 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 guidelines below and improve our help pages whenever you see the opportunity.

What are our content guidelines?

• Language and length
  • 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, and note that many visitors have English only as a second language.
  • Shorter pages are generally better - be concise and consider splitting long pages into shorter ones.
  • 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.
• Media and styling
  • All pages should include photos whenever possible. Screenshots are an excellent way to illustrate guides.
    • Screenshots should be from a neutrally themed community.
    • 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 the topic.
  • Pages need to work across both light and dark themes - if colors are necessary, make sure they work across different wikis. In particular: if a background color is defined, a text color should also be defined.
  • Section headers should be in sentence case (i.e. don't capitalize every word).
• Advanced topics
  • Info about most MediaWiki extensions (those not specific to Fandom) and complex help for MediaWiki features can be left on http://www.mediawiki.org rather than included here.
  • Some extensions may not work perfectly in conjunction with Shared Help - make sure to test their behaviour away from Community Central.

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:
  • {{Help and feedback section}} under the section title "Further help and feedback".

If advanced options or additional reference material is needed, it's often best to 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 update

Advanced notes

Using links in Shared Help

Local links within help pages are kept as local links when shared.

This can cause some odd effects if you're trying to link to pages on specific communities, so there are some recommendations about how to write these:

• To link to another Shared Help page (or another page on the same wiki), use an internal link:

  [[Help:Shared Help]] - Help:Shared Help

  [[MediaWiki:Emoticons]] - MediaWiki:Emoticons

• To link to a specific page on Community Central (i.e. community.fandom.com), use this style:

  [[w:Special:Forum|Special:Forum on CC]] - Special:Forum on CC

• To link to a page on another community (e.g. glee.fandom.com), use this style:

  [[w:c:glee|Glee Wiki]] - Glee Wiki

  [[w:c:glee:Rachel Berry|Rachel Berry on Glee Wiki]] - Rachel Berry on Glee Wiki

Note: Help:Improving help pages/linktest tests various link types for Shared Help.

Redirects

Redirects work invisibly on Shared Help - the visitor will see the expected content, but won't see a note saying they've been redirected. However, it is still a good idea to update links to point to the new name.

We advise against deleting help page redirects, as they may be linked to from other wikis.

Categories

All important help pages should be in Category:Help as well as any more specific appropriate categories. No special sorting code is needed.

See also

• Help:Shared Help

Further help and feedback

• Browse and search other help pages at Help:Contents
• Check Fandom Community Central for sources of further help and support
• Check Contacting Fandom for how to report any errors or unclear steps in this article