Talk:Wikimedia Hackathon 2017/Wikidata documentation sprint

In case you do not know it yet: I strongly recommend to consider the approach promoted at http://everypageispageone.com/the-book/.

The documentation sprint has started! We currently have a group working on improving the beginner user doc on Wikidata, currently talking about the structure of the main page. Some other people work on the Query Service and the constraint reports on Wikidata. Some other will work on Wikibase. If you want to join, feel free to have a look at the Phabricator tickets and start doing stuff :)

For me the current help documentation is a nightmare mainly because of its dipersion over dozen of pages. This is a huge disadvantage especially for newbies when looking for specific information. The minimum should be to have all help pages listed in one portal in order to have everything at the same place.

Then creation of help pages (help:XXXX) and wikidata pages (wikidata:XXX) can be done by everyone without any approval or discussion of the community. This leads to a lot of pages providing information but without any global structure and sometimes not reflecting the community usage.

My conclusions are the following:

• we need to define what are the pages recommended by the community as help documentation and reflecting the usage of this community.
• we need to organize these pages in an unique structure and to be able to have an overview of the pages in a portal. My proposition is to create a new topic list in Wikidata:Community portal regrouping all help pages and Wikidata pages dealing with help documentation.
• we need a Policy for creation of help pages and wikidata pages which forces to pass through a community approval in order to keep the global view of the documentation and to ensure that the documentation is reflecting the community usage.

Thank you Snipre for your suggestions! I won't answer to that right now, but we will definitely discuss it during the event. Just one thing, when you talk about a unique portal for help pages, something already exists: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Contents Do you find this page useful? What could be improved?

Yes, but what is strange in that page which is theoretically dedicated to help pages is to found some pages titled Wikidata:XXX. What is a help page and what is a wikidata page ? We should have here a better definition. Then we should be able to found this list in the Wikidata: Community portal. Currently there is no global structure for documentation page: people create pages and linked them without any organizational view. So newbies have to be lucky to find a help page with the good links to be able to find the information they need. In my opinion we should have trunk page and this trunk page has to be Community portal.