The presentation you show is not optimized for what people should be coming to Help for. The help topics are also in a rather arbitrary hierarchy, and not showing the relative importance or order that things should be read by a new user.

For example, most of the Policy stuff should be reference at the bottom, not main Help information.

To fix this, the whole Help should be one single page that site moderators can edit. Codidact can provide a template for new sites, or URLs for links to standard Codidact articles, like most of the Policy stuff.

The advantage of a fully editable page is that Codidact won't dictate an overall presentation, and therefore doesn't have to deal with the associated arguments of what should go where, and the work of maintaining it. Codidact can still provide a template for new sites, which can be left in place when the site admins don't want to bother.

Back when the Electrical Engineering site was new, I wrote a bunch of help pages aimed mostly at telling new users what they needed to know from their perspective. Unfortunately, since then Codidact has imposed much distracting drivel (from the point of view a new user) around what I wrote. The ever-confusing issue of what is Codidact versus the particular site you are on is not clear, and the part I need new users to see is buried where they will probably give up before reading it.

Effective teaching starts with the learner's context in mind, then presenting new information in a hierarchical form always relevant to the existing context that is slowly being built. The current Codidact help totally fails in that regard.

The whole presentation makes no sense at a high level. I'd be willing to put the effort into fixing it, but can't change the parts that really need to be fixed. I need to do more than move a few boxes around and help topics within boxes. The whole concept of boxes is bad in the first place. Give me the ability to fix it.

Giving moderators the ability to edit the entire page isn't something that's likely to be possible, or something that we'd have the appetite for doing given that there's certain information we have to ensure is on there and other information about the network that we want to be included for every community.

I wouldn't have a problem with links to certain pages being mandatory, or someone from Codidact having to approve edits to the top level page. I don't expect that's something that would change a lot.

I still want to be able to set the whole presentation, which includes all the Codidact mandatory stuff. However, while I understand that stuff may need to be there for legal reasons, it gives all the wrong impressions when it's featured as if it were the most important thing.

I can't say until experimenting exactly how I'd want to structure the main help page, but without the flexibility I'll never have a chance to try. It's one of those things that I want to write it, look at it from different points of view, think about it a while, tweak, repeat, etc, until something I'm happy with finally emerges. I have some ideas, but I won't really know it until I see it.

You're right, what I'm talking about is not specific to Electrical Engineering. I'd be willing to work with you guys if you make the EE help an editable page, like other articles. If we end up with something we both like, then other sites can use that as their starting point if they like. It will be rather easy to strip out and replace the EE-specific stuff, which will mostly be links in the top level page. I wasn't planning on re-writing the EE help there is so far, nor the existing Codidact help, just creating a much better structure around it all in the top page.

posted 5 days ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

5d ago

Olin Lathrop‭

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