Last modified: 2006-02-22 22:55:08 UTC
The edit page has a link to an "Editing Help" page, which it expects to be located at "Help:Edited". However, on our vanilla MW installations, this page is empty.
That's correct, we don't ship with help content at this time due to a lack of clean, internationalised help pages which aren't under some weird or useless licencing terms. There's been some discussion about it, but not a lot of action to date.
How about putting in pages that (a) give instructions on downloading the versions you DO have and (b) link to Wikipedia's versions? Admittedly, this is not a perfect solution, but it is easy and would help in many cases.
There are no such instructions on downloading, as there aren't any appropriate distributable pages.
The issue at hand is that new users should be provided with help pages. Someone clearly has recognized this fact, because each edit page has a link to an "Editing Help" page. Unfortunately, this page is empty. In a perfect world, this could be remedied by the instantaneous creation and translation of "clean, internationalised help pages which aren't under some weird or useless licencing terms". Sadly, however, this isn't a perfect world. So, what CAN be done? Getting the user to a page which is actually helpful seems like a good start. The "Help:Editing" page on Wikipedia looks fairly clean to me, although it has a few curious omissions. It may not be internationalized or licensed usefully, but neither of these is a show-stopper for putting in a link to it. As Voltaire cautions us, "The best is the enemy of the good". How about putting in something good (i.e., helpful), while we're waiting for perfection to arrive?
Default main page content updated; now has links to the user guide.
