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What help pages need to be written?
I've been working on the user help center recently - writing new help pages and improving old ones. You can see the latest changes and suggestions - even the ones that haven't been deployed to the site yet - over on GitHub.
Of course, though, I'm not going to be able to come up with everything - there will be things that need help pages that I'm not going to think of on my own. With that in mind... what help center topics would you like to see?
Feel free to leave suggestions in the answers below; I'll look through the responses and see what I can do (and I'll be updating the to-do list).
As I write this answer to say that there's nothing I can think of, I see there's an option for me to pick the license I …
4y ago
Just to formalize something that's in the works, but which I'd like feedback on: a help center page on LaTeX would be us …
4y ago
I wondered what the scope of the Linux Systems site was. So I went to the help center. There's no obvious page in ther …
1y ago
A page on how pinging in comments works would be helpful.
4y ago
Add a list of standard close reasons to the help center. It must include the full list of shared close reasons (those th …
1y ago
5 answers
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Just to formalize something that's in the works, but which I'd like feedback on: a help center page on LaTeX would be useful. It doesn't have to be (and probably shouldn't be) deployed to all sites, because most won't need to have MathJax enabled, but it would be nice to have a basic page that sites can add to their help center if need be. I wrote up an addendum to Scientific Speculation's help center page on formatting discussing basic LaTeX usage, and I'm working on expanding that to make it more detailed.
I imagine that individual sites could customize it. For instance, if there's a site about Chemistry and if they decide to enable the mhchem package, they could add in a subsection about writing formulas. If the Electrical Engineering site wanted to make it easier for folks to write circuit diagrams using tikz (though of course there are other ways to do that), they could add in a section about tikz.
Bottom line: It would be good to have a basic page sites can choose to include and customize if they want.
As I write this answer to say that there's nothing I can think of, I see there's an option for me to pick the license I want to use for this post.
Aside from the fact that the category and site defaults are CC BY-SA 4.0, I'm not really sure what these licenses are effectively for or what the actual differences are, so I would find it useful (or at least, interesting) to have a brief, simplified explanation of the differences and when/why you would use one over the other.
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I wondered what the scope of the Linux Systems site was. So I went to the help center. There's no obvious page in there that explains what this site is. For instance, is this site accepting questions about programming on Linux? Instead, the limited information that exists, is hidden under "FAQ", which is confusing.
Another example: on Software CD, under FAQ, all we find about the site's scope, is this:
Software Development is about all aspects of creating software -- programming, design, architecture, testing, tools, and more
That's not nearly specific enough.
Every community should have an entry into the help center, detailing specifically what this site is about, and how it's different from the other sites.
Even though there's limited information under the FAQ, these pages aren't even uniform across the sites. For example, on Meta Codidact, it's under "Codidact Meta FAQ", not "FAQ". It also doesn't help that Meta CD has the "Guidance" and "Site information" boxes flipped from all the other communities.
A page on how pinging in comments works would be helpful.
Add a list of standard close reasons to the help center. It must include the full list of shared close reasons (those that exist across all CD sites), as well as any additional standard close reasons for the specific community.
The list must talk about the scope of questions, and why these close reasons exist. Why do we close posts? What is the reasoning behind it? How should closure be applied?
This help center article is supposed to both be informative, and explain why we close questions. Can link to an MCD Q/A that goes more in depth.
I'm not sure where else I'd expect to find this particular list. In the close vote dialog, yes, but that's only available to those with the "curate" ability. The flagging dialog should also list these standard close reasons, however, a longer discussion of them isn't appropriate there. It would also better serve as a shortcut to them, rather than being the list to read.
Some communities already have somewhat of such a list, Software CD, for instance. MCD does not have one. In general, I'm lost as to where I should go to find this, and I need to perform manual searches in the help center to find them (literally clicking into each page, because I don't recognize which page would contain this, based on the titles).
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