 | This help page is ahow-to guide. It explains concepts or processes used by the Wikipedia community. It is not one ofWikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels ofconsensus. |
This page contains guidelines for users who respond to questions posed by other users on theHelp desk.
If you feel a question belongs on theReference desk,try to answer it anyway, if you can. The Reference Desk is where our field experts andpolymaths hang out, so they are much more likely to be able to answer knowledge queries. Therefore, whether you answer the question or not, provide the user with a useful tip by inserting the template{{subst:HD/rd}}, which says:
This page is for questions about editing Wikipedia. Please consider asking this question at theReference desk. They specialize in knowledge questions and will try to answer any question in the universe (except how to use Wikipedia, since that is what this Help Desk is for). Just follow the link, select the relevant section, and ask away. You could always trysearching Wikipedia for an article related to the topic you want to know more about. I hope this helps.{{subst:RD2}} and{{subst:RD3}}, which let you direct editors to a specific reference desk section or article respectively. For more information, seeWikipedia:Help desk/RD tip.{{HD}}, which has one variant for each section.When you answer a question, pleaselink any Wikipedia-specific terms in your answer to pages which define them. New users who ask questions on the Help desk may be unfamiliar with Wikipedia jargon, so linking these terms is very helpful. For example:contributions,talk page,link,neutral point of view, etc.
Linking to Wikipedia's documentation is also important for maintaining accuracy. Sometimes our personal recollection of apolicy or guideline may be slightly wrong, or we don't word it as clearly as the documentation pages do. The documentation pages represent the currently-best results of many Wikipedia editors who continuously refine Wikipedia's instructions to make them as clear as possible. Directing questioners to these pages ensures they get the most accurate instructions.
Even if the questioner you are responding to appears to be familiar with Wikipedia jargon, you should link your jargon anyway. Other users may read the Help desk now or in the future (for example, bysearching the Help desk archives). The more we link the Wikipedia jargon we use, the more we build Wikipedia'sinternal web of links, over time creating a giant integrated structure of knowledge.
See#How to look up definitive answers for places to find these links.
Some questions on the Help desk are unclear, or excessively general. Often you can gain more insight into what the questioner is trying to do by checking a questioner'scontributions.
A user's contributions may also give a rough idea of the questioner's level of Wikipedia experience. If a user has few edits, or does not typeedit summaries, that might suggest the user is new to Wikipedia and may not be able to understand a highly technical answer.
New contributors might not put pages on theirwatchlist, or might not know how to check their watchlist to see if their queries have been answered. Consider using anotification to notify them when you reply to their queries.
Some users may ask how to do specific things, without explaining why they want to do them. Sometimes a better method may exist to reach the questioner's real (but unstated) goal. Try to be aware of when a question may contain ared herring, i.e., a request for help with something other than what the questioner might be better off trying. If the questioner's real motive is not clear, it never hurts to ask "Why do you want to doX?" to avoid theXY problem.
Some questions on the Help desk make little or no sense. Often these questions come from users who read about something in a Wikipedia article, and assume they are looking at the official site for the article's subject. This is common because manysearch engines rank Wikipedia articles high in search results – people who search for companyZ may come to the Wikipedia article on it, instead of companyZ's official site. To answer these users, use the{{Astray}} standard response template.
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Some questions, or types of question, are asked so often that there are now template answers available to save you having to type out the same answer time and time again. These templates, shown in the box to the right, should always be"subst"ed, and have a signature appended with ~~~~. If the answer in the template doesn't 100% match the question, consider substing the template and then editing the text to suit the circumstance.
The template:{{HD}} has a series of parameters and can be used for almost any help desk purpose. See its page for details.
Many Help desk questions are repetitive, and the answers are already written down somewhere. Showing questioners how you find answers, and linking to documents containing them, may help new users learn to look up their own answers. Knowing how to look things up is, of course, essential for contributing to anencyclopedia, and for mastering Wikipedia's complex rules and procedures. The following resources are helpful for finding answers:
It's good to search for an answer even if you already know the answer, just to make sure you haven't forgotten something important.
The{{Help desk searches}} template displays links to several searches that are useful for answering questions on the Help desk. You may also wish to add it to youruser page for quick reference from anywhere on Wikipedia:
The Help desk generally follows the same formatting rules as atalk page, although the Help desk itself is not technically a talk page – it is in the Wikipedia:Namespace, rather than in one of the talk namespaces.
Many questions on the Help desk are from new users who have not yet learned much aboutwikitext markup, let alone ourTalk page guidelines. Thus you may find some questions to be very poorly formatted. While the talk page guidelines say we should not edit other people's talk page entries, sometimes a user's question is so poorly formatted that it can actually mess up the Help desk page, or be very difficult to read. In such cases, use your judgement, as the poor formatting is unlikely to have been the questioner's intent, and tidying up a question may help both the questioner and other Help desk volunteers. However, in general we do not correct mere typographical errors, misspellings, and so on.
Wedo edit questions that contain personal information such as e-mail addresses and telephone numbers. The Help desk is a highly visible page, and volunteersonly respond by adding replies to the Help desk (or to the user'stalk page if the user so requests). Thus there is no reason for a questioner to leave personal off-Wikipedia contact information. Since the Help desk page is highly visible on the Internet, personal contact information only invites abuse, so feel free to remove it from a question when you answer the question. You can add a {{subst:HD/cd}} to explain to the questioner why you removed the contact details.
Many Help desk questions are from users who are very new to Wikipedia, and often they do notsign their questions. You can improve these questions by appending the{{unsigned}} template to them. To identify the user who left a question, check theHelp desk history. When you answer, you could also tell them that they should sign their contributions. Consider adding {{subst:HD/s}}.
Anyone reading this page has probably already decided to answer questions on the Help desk, but it's still useful to list some reasons for doing so.
The Help desk must constantly recruit and train new volunteers to answer questions, to handle growth in question volume, and to replace other volunteers who move on to other areas of Wikipedia, or leave the project altogether. Some users will gravitate toward helping on the Help desk on their own, but we should also invite others. If the Help desk should ever run short of volunteers, the response time and quality could suffer, and helping wouldn't be as much fun for the few remaining volunteers. If the Help desk fails, the entire Wikipedia project could suffer. Therefore, we should recruitmore volunteers than we need, to ensure that we never run short. Having a surplus of volunteers makes it possible to respond to user requests with more complete answers, or even to give some editing assistance.Given enough eyeballs, all questions are simple, since each additional volunteer will have seen a few things the other volunteers have not. We expect the power of the Help desk to increase with the number of volunteers, perhaps without limit.
Good candidates for the Help desk include users who have accumulated (or want to accumulate) some advanced knowledge about Wikipedia, but are currently mired incontent disputes or other psychologically taxing conflicts in other parts of Wikipedia. The Help desk is a great place for such editors to forget about their own problems by absorbing themselves in the problems of others, and to gain better knowledge of Wikipedia's policies and guidelines that will help them avoid, or resolve, content disputes in the future.
If you're tired of fightinguphill battles, come to the Help desk and unwind.