User:Jaszon Maynard/Jaszons sandbox Help the general help

I'm currently developing this article and will probably eventually publish it to the wiki

Anyone may edit this wiki, subject to the wiki's policies regarding editing. There's a lot to write for this Help, here's a few ideas and guidelines.

Articles That Need Work

In addition to the various red links you will find to articles that need to be created, here's a list of articles that need expansion or that have barely been written at all: Help stubs.

Guidelines & Considerations for Writing Help

Organization of Topics

It seems likely that eventually a lot of the information contained under Main Viewer will be accessible from two perspectives: 1) From the perspective of the Viewer's organization, the perspective of the menus and pop-up windows in the Viewer; and 2) From a functional perspective. And this is probably a good thing.

For instance

Write Or Link?

Editors will have to consider, if there is a reliable, well-maintained site somewhere that does a good job of covering a topic, is it better for an article to simply refer the reader to that site, or is it better to write about the topic right here in this wiki.

Of particular note in regards to linking to articles are the articles in the secondlife Knowledge Base (KB). These are maintained by employees of Linden Labs, and so can be a great resource. Unfortunately viewing them requires a login (a slow, often broken process that may confuse the reader) which times-out. If a reader simply clicks a link they get a page saying they have timed-out and can't view the page and there's no way to recover.

Even if Linden changes the timeout requirement, these articles are denoted by an ID # which may or may not remain stable, in which case the link could break. The KB is also going to be re-coded, in part to remove the requirement of logging-in before reading help. That may also cause a break in the links to their articles.

There are only 2 alternatives at this point. The best one is to instruct the reader they must go login first, then they may click the link. This will probably be confusing, and who knows if the article ID # will remain stable, but at least there's a chance they'll get to read the KB article.

A second choice, more confusing, & harder, but at least not prone to link-breakage, is to tell the reader to login to the support site and tell them search terms to enter and the title of the article they should look for.

Since the KB is such a valuable resource, at the very least, it would be good to find some way to put links to useful KB articles belong in a "Further Reading" section.

Operating System Independence

When starting an article it may help future editors if you give some thought to structure and platform-specific dependencies: Can the article be written as a single topic that's valid for all operating systems (with perhaps small embedded notes about O.S. differences), or does the article need to be organized into broad sub-sections where section 1 deals just with Windows, section 2 Macintosh, and section 3 Linux?

SLurls, Tutorials

When possible the article should include useful SLurls, and if there are applicable in-world tutorials definitely give a SLurl to the relevant place (like Public Orientation Island or Public Help Island). Since the SLurl won't bring you right to the tutorial, & the islands can be crowded, confusing, laggy, & crashy, describe major landmarks near the applicable tutorial and how to get there so the resident can find it. i.e.--Once you've arrived, find the tall building labelled "XYZ". Stand so the building is to your left. Walk straight ahead until you come to a stand of trees, and look for a sign on your right....