User:Ziko/Basic Wikipedia and help pages

Basic Wikipedia and help pages every Wikipedia should have

For a new or small Wikipedia language edition, it is difficult to build up a system of Wikipedia pages and help pages. Of course, you could simply translate from English Wikipedia, but its rules are often rather complicated and a huge amount of text. And sometimes they are not suitable for your language edition.

The following pages are a suggestion. Please take the issue of Wikipedia and help pages very serious, because they will prevent a lot of frustration, waste of time and unproductive discussions.

Generally, try not to split the information into too many single pages. Hopping from one page to another is more confusing than reading a thorough and well structured page dealing with a greater subject.

Wikipedia pages

Wikipedia pages tell your readers and contributors about the project itself.

• Wikipedia:Welcome, giving the most basic information and leading to the sitemap and other primary pages.
• Wikipedia:Sitemap, an overview helping to find the relevant page. (An alternative is an A-Z index of project pages, such as this.)
• Wikipedia:General rules, a kind of bylaws, telling what are the goals, what does not belong to an encyclopedia, general rules for behaviour.
• Wikipedia:Frequently Asked Questions, intended more for your readers than to your contributors.
• Wikipedia:Statistics, where to find the tools.
• Wikipedia:Free knowledge and licences, about the concept of Free Knowledge and licences like GFDL and CC.
• Wikipedia:In the news, listing news coverage about your language edition. This makes your Wikipedians proud or helps them to find out what could be improved.
• Wikipedia:Public relations, about what you are doing to promote your language edition, like press releases, flyers, information about representation at clubs and forums etc.

Help pages

Help pages are directed to those who want to contribute.

• Help:Registration, how to create an user account and why one should do this.
• Help:Edit, how to create and edit an article.
• Help:Pictures, what a contributor must know about using, uploading and integrating pictures.
• Help:Glossary, a kind of dictionary about Wikipedia and internet culture jargon, saving a lot of searching time to your contributors.
• Help:Language, indicating what standard variety will be used, how to deal with different spellings, which dictionary is recommended, how to type special characters. This is useful especially for languages with few standardization.
• Help:Technical matters, about e.g. reporting a bug.
• Help:Referencing, not only about the technique, but about the idea itself.

See also

• Manual for new and small Wikipedias