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/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 ? ^[1]

Templates

Two 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.

To do :

• Zai is working on Vidtut template for Torley’s Video Tutorials.

Contents

• Several pages must be converted into categories (and pages) :
  • Help:Second_Life_FAQ (all pages created - ":help" page must be edit with auto redirect.. which page ?)
  • User:Lum_Pfohl/Troubleshooting
    • a lots of interesting informations, I will ask Lum if he's ok.
  • Glossary
    • Since several names pages have already been used (often for Open Source portal), I propose the following name pages : NAME_DEF (like definition)^[2]
• All help pages must be updated with help template
• All "help:" pages must be converted into normal pages
• Each video tutorial must have its own page (to be easily found with categrories) (check Vidtut section of this page)
• I added "suggestion box" in the portal : What is its goal and how to organise this page ?
  • I propose the reserved this page for subject not found in the help portal and suggestion on Help Portal organisation (new categories,etc) => It could be the portal's discussion page ?
• Maybe a more “resident oriented” Quickie Wiki Intro is also needed (ex : how to use discussion pages, minor/major update, how to watch pages, etc.) ?^[3]

Once finished, we need to:

• Move User:Gally Young/help portal to Help Portal
• 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)

Video tutorials

Torley's video turorials must be easy to find. There are about 160 videos (40TotW and 120 quicktips). Put these videos into portal’s categories is probably the most difficult part.
Specific templates will be created for theses video and each video will have its own pages. Name scheme will probably be NAME_VT. Each pages will be sort through several categories :

• Video tutorials categories :
  • Video tutorials
    • Video tutorials/Quictips
    • Video tutorials/Tip of the Week
    • Video tutorials/Beginner
• 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 mutiple 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.

Discussions

1. ^ good idea, done that in the sandbox -zai
2. ^ hm... 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...
3. ^ QWI II got that but might need to restructure the current QWIs to make them better for new Residents

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)

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