Talk:Help Portal

General Portal Organization

Help is organized through several categories:

• Category:Bug Fixes for bugs related articles.
• Category:Help/Avatar for Avatar related articles.
• Category:Help/Object for Object related articles.
• Category:Help/Viewer for Viewer related articles.
• Category:Help/Communication for Communication related articles.
• Category:Help/Multimedia for Multimedia related articles.
• Category:Help/Land for Land&Sim related articles.
• Category:Help/Community for Community related articles.
• Category:Help/Navigation for Navigation related articles.
• Category:Help/Wiki for Wiki related articles.
• Category:Glossary for Glossary related articles.
• Category:Help/Misc for other articles.

Ideas : Other categories can be created (if needed):

• Category:Help/Linden Lab.
• Category:Help/Hardware.
• Category:Help/Money

We could also link all help categories to Category:Help Portal ? done =)

Templates

Six templates have been created:

1. Template:Help Header : Header with links to the help categories of the portal.
2. Template:Help : Define categories for all help pages.
3. Template:Help/Disclaimer  : Disclaimer for critical content.
4. Template:TVT : Template to include Vid Tuts (design not finsihed but content running)
5. Template:VT Header : Header with links to different Vid Tut categories-
6. Template:VT Classics Warning : Warning box for old Vid Tuts

To do :

• Zai & Kuraiko are working on Vidtut template for Torley's Video Tutorials. (read Vidtut section)
• Documentation must be written about new templates utilization.

Contents

• Several pages must be converted into categories (and pages) :
  • Help:Second_Life_FAQ (all pages created - Help:Second_Life_FAQ must be edit with link to new pages)
  • User:Lum_Pfohl/Troubleshooting
    • a lots of interesting information, I will ask Lum if he's ok.
• All help pages must be updated with help template
• All "help:xxxxxx" pages must be converted into normal pages
• Each video tutorial must have its own page (to be easily found with categories) (read Vidtut section)
• I added "suggestion box" in the portal: What is its goal and how to organise this page?
  • I propose to reserved this page for subject not found in the help portal and suggestion on Help Portal organisation (new categories, etc) => could it be the portal's discussion page?
• + "Resident oriented" Quickie Wiki Intro see discussion point below.

Glossary

Several names pages have already been used (often for Open Source portal). We will apply the following rules (tks Zai!):

• Technical pages will be moved towards "NAME_AWG (or NAME/AWG)
• Links will be updated (with the special page "what links here")
• Special message will be included in these pages "In case you're looking for the AWG page related to "NAME", please browse to NAME AWG"

NB: Currently, the SL’Glossary page includes more than 200 words !

Video tutorials

Torley's video tutorials must be easy to find. There are ~160 videos (40 TotW + 120 quicktips). Put these videos into portal's categories is probably the hardest part.
Zai & Kuraiko are working on specific template for video tutorial, each video will have its own pages. Name scheme will probably be NAME_VT. Each page will be sort through several categories:

• Video tutorials categories:
  • Video tutorials
    • Video tutorials/Quictips
    • Video tutorials/Tip of the Week
    • Video tutorials/Basics
    • Video tutorials/Classics
• Help Portal categories.
  • Help/Avatar, Help/Object, etc.

Torley Linden's categories (avatar, control, build, etc) won't be created (too many cat), we will only use portal's cats. I contacted Torley, he is okey for new vidtuts organisation through multiple pages but he warned me that in longer-term, he hopes "that the current http://secondlife.com/video page will be faded/deprecated by an improved Showcase with videos". Currently, adding new video is very time consuming, we must try to make the new template simple to use :)

Proofread

My English is not "perfect", big proofread will be necessary.

Go live

Once finished, we need to:

• Move User:Gally Young/help portal to Help Portal
• Add Help Portal to Category:Portals
• Redirect Help to Help Portal
• Move this page to the suggestion box spot (or talk page from Help Portal
• Fix the link in the Template:Help Header
• Make a Template:Main Page/Help Portal for inclusion in the Main Page.
• Ask a Wiki Admin to include the template in the Main Page (would suggest Torley, Rob or Lexie)

Discussions

Whew...

Neato o.O I had the same in mind after Jason Maynard stopped the work on his portal. So I just made some notes four days ago (ping) but looks like you were faster ^^. Great work!
Greetz, Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:39, 2 August 2008 (PDT)

P.S.: Two other things I had in mind which could improve such a Portal:

• Having a Help Portal header like the LSL Header. This would link to the different help categories. It could also have an inbuild Template:Multi-lang already and work like Template:Visl to register the pages to different help categories. But that's optional.
• Turning the Second Life FAQ and the Glossary into categories.

Last thing would be, to finally move all Second Life related help articles out of the Help: namespace (which is filtered from the Wiki search by default), reserving the Help: namespace just for Wiki related help.

Greetz, Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 21:59, 2 August 2008 Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} (PDT)

Thanks Zai ;)
I read your note (but my german is far behind me (some points weren't clear for me), I will try again later ^^ )
thanks for you very good ideas, I put them on the "To do list". I'm also searching a better way to find video tutorials. To organise the portal, I have created/used the following categories :

• Help/Avatar
• Help/Object
• Help/Land
• Help/Community
• Help/Viewer
• Help/Communication
• Help/Multimedia
• Help/Navigation
• Help/Misc
• Bug Fixes

I have updated the "To do list" :)
Gally Young 02:04, 3 August 2008 (PDT)

Oh hehe. Yuss, parts are in German ^_^ but it's all just weird drafts anyway and even Kuraiko (who's sandbox it is) had trouble understanding them although he's native in German. I compared the stuff i noted with the things you've done already and the things I suggested in the previouse comment so only things "missing" which are on my list: another help category for Wiki help (having Help:Contents, QWI I & QWI II as well as a link to the MediaWiki Help:Contents, to the parser functions and maybe Torley's new site about Wiki myths). I also had one tiny box in mind, placed on the portal with some text like "Help us to help you" where people are invited to contribute. To leave feedback on what they were missing on articles at related discussion pages, or to improve the articles content on their own and such. So many will believe this is a static or LL obtained Wiki and don't realize that they can help improving it.

Sorting the Video Tutorials is kinda a challange. The YouTube Channel states it's currently 315 videos. Having them all on a seperate page might result in colliding article names so another name scheme might help. Like NAME_(VT). Could then have a video tutorial category with subcategories for different topics (and also link the tuts to the related help categories of course).

Re:Glossary: yuss, most of the parts are really small... I'm not quite sure how to handle it well. Some of the others are small in the glossary but got seperate pages describing them (like Landmarks or Map - had them added to Category:Glossary earlier). Then there is common online lingo mixed in which could be filtered and linked to a relating wiktionary article instead. Like: "If you're looking for internet lingo, please browse here." I'll poke my head on some more ideas, how to address this problem... Need to run now since I'm already late (^_^)°

Keep up the great work, it's so exhilarant to watch it grow!

Cyas, Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 06:02, 3 August 2008 (PDT)

P.S.: I got an idea for a neat melony lookin' VidTut template. Plz gimme up to three days to implement. I dunno how swamped I am in the upcomin' days but will try to hurry (^_^)

-- Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 09:53, 3 August 2008 (PDT)

I update the "To do list" with your comments, tks Zai:)

• Your "Wiki help" category is a very good idea, I'm going to check if something has ever been done (or create it).
• We can indeed add "suggestion box" to the portal, I add it to the To do list, a nice picture would be usefull :)
• Your category:Glossary is also very interesting. For short text, we could use special name scheme (Glossary/NAME ?)
• About video tutorials :
  • I count : 116 quicktips & 44 TotW => 160 pages...
  • For name scheme, we can use special name tag (video_tutorials/NAME, NAME_VT => not sure which one is the best...)
  • Vidtut need "vidtuts categories" & "help categories" and template must propose all these cat.
  • We must also keep in mind that in some case vidtut pages will become "real" help pages (with text for advanced informations). So I suppose vidtut template must be call by help template (I let you see which solution is better)Gally Young 11:32, 3 August 2008 (PDT)

@suggestion box picture: oh yeah! problem with pics is, that you can't use em for links atm :-( which is really sad. could create wiki pages way more colorful and interesting if WEB-732 would be implemented. Btw: Having the five latest blog posts at the portal (or the main page) would be neat too -> WEB-590.

But even with the limited resources now we could try to add some color like kuraiko did in his porfile.

@resident orientated QWI: I wrote the mentioned explanation about discussion pages here at QWI II. But I agree... we might restructure the QWIs... Since the template stuff is very much for the beginning and also mostly mentor focused.

@vidtut: oh might be that he got some unrelated stuff in his youtube channel too... I also thought about having it as subpages of the video tutorials page but it wouldn't look as nice later in the category links. the article names might become long and would be even longer with "Video Tutorials/" in front of every name. so I would like it better when we would go with one of the other solutions but I'm flexible.

I aggree that every vid tut page should have the template header and categories too. But I think we can have seperate pages with the vid tuts as their only content (+ categories + header). However, other articles can of course video tutorials too. for example: having a vid tut about "texture creation" could be stored as "Texture Creation VT" (or "Video Tutorials/Texture Creation" or ...). there could be an additional article called "texture creation" which has the video tut in it as well but which wouldn't be included in the vid tut category. so having a space with "related articles" in the vid tut template would be best I guess... I'll think about it more.

@glossary: not yet sure how to make it but can go ahead with the Glossary/Name sheme if you like =) or just turn the glossary category into a page. like the Category:LSL Integer explains the integer type and also is a category with integer related articles.

Well... need to get some sleep now ^_^ been an exhausting day. greetz :-)

Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 17:12, 3 August 2008 (PDT)

Thanks for your personal investment Zai, and thanks also to Kuraiko for his hard work on vidtut template :) I have added new "Go live" section in the to-do-list (and put your comments inside) and create QWI, glossary & Go live section in discussions (and moved our last discussions in these sections). I’m almost ready for glossary (need to clearly identify & move AWG pages before starting pages creation, my goal is to finish glossary before/during the next we). I have also added comments about vidtuts.

Vid Tut Cats

I just had a look at the keywords Torley tagged his videos with. So far, I got the categories "video tutorials", "basics", "classics", "tip of the week" and "quicktips" + the help categories you created. Using the tags of Torley too would mean we'd have to make categories for all of the following: explore, video, control, tech, external tool, script, build, avatar, audio, social, group, land, web, performance, search, inventory, shop, script, basic, snapshot. I'm not yet sure if it's an improvement or not. It might be better to turn the Video Tutorials/Quicktips (for example) into Category:Video Tutorials/Quicktips as is, changing the external links into internal ones to the connected page. This way it could keep it's tags without cluttering the pages with too many categories. I think the other way might just ask too much of the visitors... Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 13:12, 4 August 2008 (PDT)

Hmm... or even redirect Category:Video Tutorials/Quicktips to Video Tutorials/Quicktips since Torley obtains them by hand to have them tagged. Hmm... Hard nut (^_^)

Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 13:20, 4 August 2008 (PDT)

I haven't noticed there was so many sub-categories. Ok, if necessary sub-cat can be add later ^^. Besides, I think redirecting Video Tutorials/Quicktips toward Category:Video Tutorials/Quicktips is better, but we must merge the Video Tutorials/Quicktips's table in the Category:Video Tutorials/Quicktips page.
Gally Young 13:33, 4 August 2008 (PDT)

The torley vid tut template is almost done. Content is ready, just style is still changing. Furthermore got some changes in the style of the help header. Have a look here. The disclaimer box is includeable for articles with "critical" content. Like prices for islands or such. Video tutorial test is here but the template as such isn't done yet. needs more crazyness around the video. But Kuraiko is investigating. All templates we changed are listet here. Guess it might be ready to implement tomorrow. I hope... Will need to add some documentation and such too. Just wanted to update you so you don't think we're all lazy ^_^

Greetz! Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 18:04, 5 August 2008 (PDT)

P.S.: Wrote some comments in footnotes to some other ideas. Please scroll up =)

Friendly greetings Gally and Zai! 'Tis I. Great to see this energetic discussion and thanks for helping to categorize my Video Tutorials, making them easier to find — that's what counts. Expanding on what Gally noted above, we have plans to make video tutorials more searchable from http://secondlife.com/showcase based on VodPod's API which would not be part of the wiki system, but hopefully be easier for new Resis and older ones alike to navigate. Those "What's it about?" tags are placeholders for future categorization, laying the groundwork for the VodPod collection I'll setup eventually. (The current YouTube widget in the Showcase is very limited and just has... a long list of vids.)

Just wanted to give you this heads-up so you don't waste time on work that is planned to be deprecated in due time anyway; your contributions are rockin' on! Another thing I should share is I'm working with our Documentation Team to embed more videos in the Knowledge Base, and for the effective purposes of that medium, they'll indicate notes when some stuff is out-of-date. I look forward to seeing continued development on your vidtut template. Yayzerama indeed. - Torley on 2008-08-06 @ 10:55 AM PST

• Hi Torley! I'm very pleased to read you here ^^.
  • It's difficult (for me ^^) to imagine help portal without vidtut fully integrated into help categories... but it's also hard de measure work needed to update wiki, maybe Zai&Kuraiko will have a more accurate point of view than me...
• Zai,you have done a very good job on vidtut (I looked at your wiki sandbox!) You have even succeed to organise vidtut page(contributor, note, etc), we could do the same for help page (contributor, interesting links, notes, etc) :)
  • For the "Help Header", I think it is maybe too long (for example for small screen/window), we could split it into two lines? Add border&color to the "help header" is a very good idea (I tried to do it yesterday !)
  • For the "watermelon-warning box" ^^, I would inverse color (border=red and center=green), (I found black on red not easy to read) - but otherwise it’s already good as it is :)
  • Very nice job on template documentation! I add this point to the list (even if the job is almost done :))
  • We could merge help and TVT templates. New categories can be added later and it will be simpler to add them in only one template :)
    • Besides, what about adding an "out of date" tag in help template ? (some wiki-pages/vidtut are old) It could help us to find article in need of updates, I was also thinking about a "help pages" category which include ALL help pages available in the wiki...Gally Young 13:51, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Heyas and welcome to our comfy lil discussion page (^_^)

I wouldn't call the work "wasted" in case we are allowed to store the Vid Tuts on the Wiki even after the shift to the KB. I for myself am not a big fan of the KB so wouldn't have found videos there. I can Imagine that some like the KB better then the Wiki so for them the KB would be the right spot. Having them in both places can only be a benefit for Resident enlightment. And that should be our big goal with this. Maintaining the Vid Tuts once we worked through the large backlog should be managable and quite easy. So we can keep them up-to-date over here while you have an eye on the KB.

@Template changing: The TVT template doesn't contain a contributor but yeah it has notes and links. I made it since I thought there would be a limited amount of "advanced" Wiki users (Torley, Kuraiko, you and me and maybe someone else who's willing to help) who works with it. So we all know how to use a template. "Basic" users might be scared of templates. Even the normal Wiki syntax might confuse them and they will be looking for a possibility to just write a help article like they'd do that in their office suit without some weird syntax. Having a template will unify the look of pages but might scare of potential contributors who don't want to be bothered with templates. So I'm not sure if we should include it. The reason why it works in the LSL Portal might be, that it's just scripters who are contributing and those are familiar with weird looking syntax. Even many of those are scared of from the complex templates. So I think we should keep the use of them as low as possible. But can implement it of course since it's quite easy to do. I'm not sure if we should tho

@Help Header: Kuraiko just made the help header squeezable so that solves the problem I hope ^^

@warning box: I'm not sure if black on green is much easier so black on the bright pink looks quite good on my screen. We just changed it to have bold text. Did that increase readablility?

@Documentation: I added some more before I moved them all to the SL Wiki (yuss, we got em here now ^^). So can have a look and add more info where you find em useful.

merging: Template:TVT currently uses Template:Help. I would refrain from a total merge since it would make Template:Help harder to use (see reason above). But new categories can easily be added so just poke me to it when you need new ones there and run into trouble.

@out-of-date: This is a good idea! There is a Template:Old-info but it could look better. It registers pages to a category named Category:Articles in need of updating. We can implement it to Template:Help instead with a nice warning box on top and maybe additional info field where people can write what's not up-to-date. Will have a look at it.

@category for all help pages: done. It's automatically added once someone adds the Template:Help Header (or any template using this template, like template help or template tvt.

Wanna add that this project is a lot of fun! =) Rly glad you started it.

Also commented on some of the other topics.

Greetz! -- Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Glossary

I propose the following name pages: NAME_DEF (like definition) Several names pages have already been used (often for Open Source portal). NB: Currently, the SL’Glossary page includes more than 200 words !

I suggest moving the OS and AWG page(s) to NAME_OS or NAME_AWG since the users who are into OS and/or AWG might be tech people who will find their pages easily when they are registert to the right categories. "Our" audience is most likely not familiar with Wikis and needs to have as few confusion as possible. So I suggest: In case pages collide, (like Inventory, we should move that page to Inventory AWG, check "what links here", fix the links, state at the new inventory page all on top "in case you're lookin for the AWG page related to "inventory", please browse to Inventory AWG". Something like that...}}

Good idea, I will do as you propose (NAME AWG)Gally Young 13:51, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Quicky Wiki Intro

Maybe a more "resident oriented" Quickie Wiki Intro is needed (ex : how to use discussion pages, minor/major update, how to watch pages, etc.)?

QWI II got that but might need to restructure the current QWIs to make them better for new Residents - Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 18:04, 5 August 2008 (PDT)

Indeed we can restructure current QWI in order to put on the 1st page “residents only" information. Gally Young 13:51, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Yuss, I'll change it a bit in the sandbox and then ask if Lum is fine with it since it was her article... then we can copy and paste again. Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Go live?

When decide we're ready to go live... I think, the portal can be used in its current state...the only 2 main points remaining are vidtut & Glossary ^^ Gally Young 13:51, 6 August 2008 (PDT)

Oh yeah I think it is kinda live already since so many articles link here that we can move it to the main namespace now. So since you started the project, the honor to move it is yours :-) *woot* This is exciting (^_^)

-- Lynch ^{(talk|contribs)} 22:28, 6 August 2008 (PDT)