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Proposal for reorganizing the Help Center
Is it possible to reorganize the Help Center? I recognize that this might be very low on the priority list, but my first experience with it was less efficient than I'd hoped. What I'd propose is this:
Left Column: Our Community (was "site information")
- About [community-name] (contains scoping & closing rules, mostly "FAQ")
- How to ask a great question (already exists, just in wrong spot, will need a community-unique section)
- How to write a great answer (doesn't exist, will need a community-unique section)
- Community Categories (already exists as "category and post types," but it's obsolete and not community-specific, should explain the "tabs" for the community)
- Voting (already exists)
- Flagging (doesn't exist, should explain the flag options very clearly, might require community-specific explanations)
- Why are posts deleted? (already exists)
Left Column: Using Codidact (was "Guidance")
- Searching Codidact (already exists as "codidact search options")
- Formatting Posts (already exists)
- Answer Scoring and Ordering (already exists)
- Post Licensing (already exists as "Guidance on available licenses on Codidact communities")
- User abilities (already exists)
The entry "Categories and Post Types" appears to be an obsolete effort to explain what the "tabs" do in the communities. We might be tempted to have a Codidact-universal explanation of those tabs, but I don't think that's particularly valuable anywhere but in one spot: in the "how to propose a new community" page.
The entry "Guidelines for referencing and quoting on Codidact communities" should be incorporated into or linked out of "How to ask a great question."
The entry "How to propose a community on the codidact.com network" should be moved to Right Column: About Codidact and renamed "Proposing a new community."
Personally, I believe "How to write good alt text" is straining at the proverbial gnat. But if it makes sense to keep, it should be either incorporated into or linked out of "Formatting posts."
2 answers
Hi! Sigma here, one of the documentation co-leads along with Mithical.
These are some great ideas. I agree with the overall sentiment that our Help pages could use some love. We face a bit of a challenge, where we have some topics that overlap between general Codidact "how-to" and community-specific details. For example, there are general principles that inform how to write a good post across communities... but a given community will have additional guidelines about how to write a successful post for that community. We've tried to create general templates for fledgling communities, but sometimes end up merely being vague. A separation across the categories mentioned above might help us avoid the flaw of trying to do too much at once.
Meanwhile, you are all welcome to contribute to the help documentation we do have. User Help currently lives on Github. As the Codidact platform continues to evolve we will need your help to catch help topics that are incomplete or out-of-date.
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Mithical here - the other documentation lead along with Sigma.
A couple notes on this suggestion:
Separating network vs. community help: I like that idea. As Sigma mentioned, there are a couple difficulties when we have help pages such as asking / answering guidance that both have similarities across the network but do have customizations on individual communities.
We'd probably wind up putting those along with the per-community help.
You suggest a flagging help page. Good idea; that is an oversight, and we could do with a page explaining how it works, what the different types of flags are, etc., more in-depth than the flagging dialogue.
This also runs into the per-community customization issue, though; different communities have different reasons for - as an example - closing questions. For users who can't yet vote to close, flagging is how that happens, but the guidance on flagging to close will differ on every community.
Answering guidance has the same problem. I considered writing a page for it, but eventually abandoned the idea because I figured that it'd need to be so specialized per-community that a network-wide outline might not even be useful. That can definitely be revisited, though.
You say the Categories (/help/articles) page is obsolete. How? I took a quick scan through it, and aside from the URL slug, the information seems to be largely still accurate, although yes, it could stand to explain how it relates to the different tabs in the header. I'm happy to fix anything obsolete there, but I'm having a hard time telling what you think is obsolete.
There are a couple specialized help pages such as the referencing one you mention, and the alt text help.
The alt text help is linked whenever you submit a post containing an image without alt text. It contains a brief explanation of why alt text is important and how to add it; it's useful as an independent help page for that linking usage.
The referencing help page exists for a similar reason, as well as the promotional guidance - for being linked to. I don't honestly expect anyone to sit down and read the Help Center unless they're _extremely bored. It's more useful to link somebody to a page specifically about what's being talked about rather than a wall of text with a section about the relevant issue.
The suggestions are appreciated, by the way; we're always looking for ways to improve. :)
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