Open Help: Peter Coombe Wikipedia: Too much documentation

I did a bad job of writing up notes for the other demos, but this one is very relevant to WordPress.

Problems:

• accumulated lots of cruft over time
• Too long (Wikipedia:Citing source is 8145 words)
• Widely varying in complexity
• duplication: 5 pages about to do tables
• poor navigation

Different entry points

• search
• links in site sidebar
• warnings and welcome messages
• page and talk page templates

Different target audiences

• readers
• new and wannabe editors
• experienced editors

The old Help:Content got 10,000 hits per day.

• Getting Started link linked to another page of links. 
• Wikipedia:Citiing Sources has around 8,000 words.

Help pages

Resistence to change

• Movement politics, resistance to top-down
• editors find it hard to identify with users
• ownership of pages
• sunk costs

How to approach it:

1. improve existing wikipedia:help project
2. did a lot of research beforehand, reports and presentations on the problems. Did usability testing with real users
3. worked around existing pages where needed

New help pages:

• New introduction to citing sources.
• Rewrote the contents page to be more tasked based.

What next?

• still a lot to do
• better guidelines for writing help pages, based on what they’ve learned
• make the software easier to use – getting a WYSIWYG editor