[Mediawiki-l] default help?

Wed Apr 6 13:31:06 UTC 2005

> Is there any way to import the entire "help" namespace from wikimedia
> into my installation?

I wish there were, but as as far as I can tell there isn't.  I've been
gradually manually adapting  help and tutorial articles from wikipedia
and meta for my personal wiki, but there's a lot of manual adjustment.
 I find that some of the stuff applicable to the wikimedia projects
needs to be changed for my needs. I need to carefully read everything
to make sure.  It's not just the help namespace either, some stuff is
in the project workspace, and some is in meta.  I've been trying to
make my help pages as self contained as I can, minimizing interwiki
links to wikipedia, mediawiki, and meta.

There has been some work done to make the help articles semi-portable
between the mediawiki projects. Most claim to be copies of generic
help articles from meta, with project specific templates used to add
project specific material.  My impression is that this is still a work
in progress though, and it still doesn't help all that much in
adapting to local wikis.

Also, a word to the new from the experienced. I'd recommend that you
read and understand the wikipedia style guide before going too far in
populating a new mediawiki based wiki.  I made several mistakes like
using initial caps for most words in article titles.  This works
against the style of using initial caps ONLY for the first word and
proper nouns in the title.  It' snot a fatal mistake, but you end up
using the pipe syntax in links much more than you'd like in order to
make a link fit into a sentence in an article body.  Another mistake I
made in my wiki (which focusses on manned spaceflight) was to use
pseudo namespaces like Mercury: and Astronaut:  this too works against
both the link syntax (for example I'd need to put in [[Astronaut:John
Glenn|]] instead of just [[John Glenn]] as well as making sorted lists
of articles less than useful.  So I find myself now going through and
fixing up all these newbie mistakes.