Wikipedia talk:Introduction (historical)

This is not the page to ask for help or to experiment.
	This page is for discussion of the Introduction pages themselves. You may be looking for one of the following pages: Draft:Sandbox - For experimenting editing. Wikipedia:Help desk - For questions about Wikipedia and editing. Wikipedia:Reference desk - For questions on factual topics (for example: Who is the pope?)

Default sandbox

Wikipedia:Sandbox should be replaced with draft:sandbox, since the latter allows testing with VisualEditor, and so is more useful to new users (the group most likely to need to test out their editing). T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 06:38, 26 April 2017 (UTC)

 Not done for various reasons:

1. This is not the talk of the sandbox
2. Sandbox is not fully protected
3. It's barely clear what you want done, I can imagine that you want WP:Sandbox to be redirected to Draft:sandbox; for such a thing, seek consensus on the right page Lil Johnny (talk) (contribs) 00:49, 7 May 2017 (UTC)

Protected edit request

{{int:savearticle}} to {{int:publishchanges}} as per MediaWiki talk:Wikimedia-copyrightwarning--Moxy (talk) 13:20, 19 December 2017 (UTC)

Done — Martin (MSGJ · talk) 12:10, 20 December 2017 (UTC)

Proposal to overhaul WP:I and WP:T

I've put up a proposal at the Village Pump to replace the old WP:I and WP:T with the superior Help:Intro. Any opinions welcomed there. T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 02:41, 18 February 2018 (UTC)

The tutorial section looks like a tab, but clicking it brings you away from the introduction's folder layout entirely

Seems like that needs a redesign, it's an unexpected and inconsistent change in interface. --occono (talk) 22:52, 16 June 2018 (UTC)

Proposal: Redirect this page and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction

Among tutorial-style introductions (so distinct from the main non-tutorial introduction, WP:Contributing to Wikipedia), it is clear that WP:Introduction and the associated WP:Tutorial are markedly inferior to Help:Introduction, the redesigned version put together from ~2015 to ~2018 and recently updated to be more mobile-friendly. They are less up-to-date, less comprehensive, less usable, etc. Evolution and evolvability's proposal to make this change two years ago may have reached consensus to proceed, but was archived before it could be closed. As I have argued before, we should be no less aggressive about merging duplicate content in WP-space than we are in mainspace — keeping it around confuses newcomers by creating a maze and wastes editors' time improving/maintaining duplicate resources.

In terms of technical implementation, since these pages have been so important in the past, I think a copy of them should be preserved. I propose that they be moved to WP:Old (original name) (e.g. WP:Old Introduction), given a historical tag with a note about the renaming, and then the original address redirected to Help:Introduction. Per the page protections, we'll need to get an admin to help perform the move.

As we've seen over the past few weeks, the Wikipedia Help Project has become pretty inactive lately, but if those of us remaining here (Moxy, Evolution and evolvability, and anyone else who sees this and wants to chime in) are all on the same page, that might be sufficient to establish consensus and save us the trouble of having to post at the Village Pump and get everyone there up to speed on why this is necessary. Let's act boldly and get this done. Cheers, Sdkb (talk) 05:21, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Think having only a few module style tutorials is more then enough as we know they are not effective as people dont complete them adventure stats show all gone by page 3....Nevertheless keep Wikipedia:The_Wikipedia_Adventure (for fun) and redirect WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction despite it being a navigational black hole it works better in mobile view and seems to retain 25% of its readers. WP:Introduction should be transformed into a normal page for easy of use with a TOC for section navigation over tab loading to a list of links....or redirected to Help:Contents that cover topics not covered in most how to "edit" tutorials (Report a problem - Find an article - Donating info - etc..).--Moxy 🍁 06:27, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Because WP:Introduction has been substituted a gazillion times in the standard welcome template and elsewhere, we're somewhat stuck with keeping it to its current use as a tutorial-style intro to WP for contributors, even though its name could also have fit with other uses, such as a redirect to WP:About or WP:Getting Started or Help:Contents. I'm hoping we can approach this as a somewhat unified front; anything else and we'll most likely end up stuck with the status quo. Sdkb (talk) 07:38, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm obviously pretty biased on this, since when I came across the original 'introduction to references' by user:The wub, I was inspired to to create a wider set based on the same style! I've found in my outreach and editathons that I've had better feedback on them than for WP:I and WP:T. One thing to note is that even though there's a drop-off in multi-tabbed information pages, there's also a drop-off in scrolling down long pages, and WP:T already has quite a few tabs, which go into some detail (e.g on tables, or manually writing <ref> tags in markup). Overall, I'd put Help:contents as more useful than WP:Introduction, though I think in the context of people going to WP:Tutorial, Help:Introduction might be more useful. Might also be worth considering the left hand menu's "interaction" section (thgouh I suspect that more new editors come to the relevant pages via welcome templates than the left hand links). Perhaps a useful scoping question is "If starting with a clean slate today, what would the ideal system look like?". Perhaps we could define a couple of 'ideal scenarios' over at the Wikipedia Help Project? T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 09:40, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Nick Moyes or another admin with experience in the help space, would you be willing to assist us with this? Sdkb (talk) 05:02, 7 March 2020 (UTC)

Comment Anyone here may also be interested in the proposal to get rid of Wikipedia:Welcoming committee/Welcome to Wikipedia. Sdkb (talk) 18:40, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

RfC

Should we redirect WP:Introduction and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction? Sdkb (talk) 22:10, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

• Support as proposer. Copying my comment from above:

Among tutorial-style introductions (so distinct from the main non-tutorial introduction, WP:Contributing to Wikipedia), it is clear that WP:Introduction and the associated WP:Tutorial are markedly inferior to Help:Introduction, the redesigned version put together from ~2015 to ~2018 and recently updated to be more mobile-friendly. They are less up-to-date, less comprehensive, less usable, etc. Evolution and evolvability's proposal to make this change two years ago may have reached consensus to proceed, but was archived before it could be closed. As I have argued before, we should be no less aggressive about merging duplicate content in WP-space than we are in mainspace — keeping it around confuses newcomers by creating a maze and wastes editors' time improving/maintaining duplicate resources. Sdkb (talk) 22:10, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Support as main contributor of the tutorial up for redirect Wikipedia:Tutorial. Next style pages dont hold readers well so why have 4 of them (4th being the Wikipedia adventure).....best keep the one that has interested editors updating it. That said much cleanup will need to be done ...like section links to Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing will need to go to Help:Editing that covers both editing environments (WikiText and VE) or like Wikipedia:Tutorial/Citing sources will need to go to Help:Referencing for beginners that again covers both editing environments because Help:Introduction divides WikiText and VE over different pages.--Moxy 🍁 01:37, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Support. Though certainly not perfect, I think that Help:intro is overall the better option than WP:T, and even WP:I. I think the useful throught experiment is "how would we organise onboarding tutorials if designing from scratch". The main objections raised two years ago have all been addressed in the subsequent time. In particular, the {{intro to}} and {{intro to single}} templates have now been updated to use flexbox css to display well on phones and narrow desktop windows (thank you to the wub for the initial design, and TheDJ for css advice). Indeed, I beleive that they are now more mobile-friendly than the current WP:T page. In expanding the series, I've tried to follow UX guideslines where possible (<70 characters per line, <250 words per tab, <6 tabs per tutorial). They also allow users to choose whether they're getting info on markup or visualeditor rather than a mix (which can be confusing to very new users). Sidenote: this is also a problem with a lot of templates that aim to implement multilpe tabs (compare Wikipedia:Tutorial vs v:WikiJournal_User_Group for a flexbox equivalent for tabs). T.Shafee(Evo&Evo)^talk 09:27, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Support streamlining the introduction and tutorial pages so that we can manage and improve them more efficiently. Wikipedia:Introduction seems redundant to the modernized Help:Introduction to Wikipedia. Wikipedia:Tutorial seems inferior to the pages linked from Help:Introduction for both Wikimarkup and the Visual Editor. Ajpolino (talk) 16:50, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Support for the reasons cited above but with the proviso that even more attention should be given to adapting the page display for use by mobile contributors. Despite significant improvements, it currently still works best in full screen display on desktops and laptops. The various limitations of using mobile phones for editing could perhaps be stressed more strongly.--Ipigott (talk) 07:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

@Ipigott: I added a note about mobile editing that appears when viewing the page on a mobile device. Thanks for the suggestion! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 02:32, 4 April 2020 (UTC)

• Comment I've left a note announcing this discussion and RfC at Help_talk:Introduction#Discussion_and_RfC and Wikipedia_talk:Tutorial#Discussion_and_RfC, in case there's anyone watching those pages who isn't watching this one. Seems the obvious places. PamD 07:28, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
• Lets close this up as snow move (no objections) and ask for help moving all!!--Moxy 🍁 14:14, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

  Yeah, with the RfC tag having just been removed, the consensus here seems very clear, so it doesn't look like it needs a formal close. Since some of the things this involves are move-protected, I'm going to add an admin help tag here. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:33, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

Implementation

We request help enacting the SNOW results of the above RfC. Could you turn WP:Introduction and WP:Tutorial into historical pages, with the original targets redirecting to Help:Introduction? Thanks! {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 23:41, 11 April 2020 (UTC)

(Non-administrator comment) Listed at WP:RM/T. I see admins patrolling that page. In my experience, that page moves faster than the {{admin help}} does. @Sdkb: I put your username instead of mine in the | requester = parameter of the request templates. Stay well, Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 16:06, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

I would have made the move, but I think you need to get an admin to close the RfC, and mostly I think you should decide whether to redirect or to move to "(historical)". L293D (☎ • ✎) 01:59, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

To be honest a redirect would be fine....edit history remains intact at its original location to be viewed. A move is simply not needed as its a new page altogether being targeted....history of the evolution on the page is not needed since is a new page. We also have this talk page as a history of what happened. Would.be confusing and complicated to merger two histories and view them separately.--Moxy 🍁 02:53, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

Okay, so this is somewhat messy currently. Anthony Appleyard moved the page to Wikipedia:Introduction (historical), so the page history is there, although they didn't move the associated header or this associated talk page. They then re-added the content to this page. I'm not sure how the redirect bots are handling it. @L293D: why do you think it's necessary to get an admin to close the RfC? There were no objections, and there was decent participation/wide enough advertising, so it seems a textbook WP:SNOW result. You're uninvolved, so you should feel free to close it yourself; there's no need to write out a long closing statement, since again, there's no one on the other side to object. I don't have a strong preference about whether or not to create a historical page, but I think, given how important a page this has been, it'd be nice to have a more accessible record of it. Either way, our focus should be just getting this implemented (it's long overdue), not ticking every bureaucratic box. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 05:02, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• @Sdkb, Moxy, and Rotideypoc41352: For information, see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard#Help needed with some moves. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:29, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
• My message quoted:
  • "See in https://en.wikipedia.org/enwiki/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requested_moves/Technical_requests&oldid=950645337 , the section "Moves needing help from someone with oversight". I tried to obey the first move, and it refused "took more than 3 seconds, ran out of time", and it asked me to move the page and its talk page and all its subpages one at a time. So, as a start, I moved Wikipedia:Introduction by itself, and it worked, Then I moved Wikipedia talk:Introduction by itself and it refused "ran out of time" and system fault, several times. So, to restore to the starting setup, I tried to move Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) back to Wikipedia:Introduction by itself, and it refused "ran out of time" and system fault, several times. So, to make the page and its subpages work, I copied the current edit of Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) back to Wikipedia:Introduction by itself. It looks like it needs someone with oversight to obey these moves. " Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:32, 13 April 2020 (UTC)
• The original requested moves were:

  • - - - - - - - - - - - -

  • Wikipedia:Introduction (currently a redirect to Help:Introduction) → Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) – per Wikipedia talk:Introduction#Proposal: Redirect this page and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction. Requester Sdkb also requested original target point to Help:Introduction. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 15:55, 12 April 2020 (UTC)
  • Wikipedia:Tutorial (currently a redirect to Help:Introduction) → Wikipedia:Tutorial (historical) – per Wikipedia talk:Introduction#Proposal: Redirect this page and WP:Tutorial to Help:Introduction. Requester Sdkb also requested original target point to Help:Introduction. Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 15:55, 12 April 2020 (UTC)

    - - - - - - - - - - - - Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:33, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

@Sdkb, Moxy, and Anthony Appleyard: based on what Moxy said (beginning To be honest a redirect would be fine...) and the situation Anthony Appleyard's encountered (see above), should we just...copy the original page's contents, paste them to the "(historical)" pages, and attribute in the edit summary? I ask because this situation may be similar enough to archiving talk page conversations that we could use the same approach. Stay well, and thanks again! Rotideypoc41352 (talk · contribs) 17:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• @Rotideypoc41352, Sdkb, and Moxy: Just now I tried again to move Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) back to Wikipedia:Introduction by itself, and it refused "Database error / To avoid creating high replication lag, this transaction was aborted because the write duration (4.107429265976) exceeded the 3 second limit. If you are changing many items at once, try doing multiple smaller operations instead. / [XpTIzwpAMOIAAnl9zXEAAACQ] 2020-04-13 20:17:26: Fatal exception of type "Wikimedia\Rdbms\DBTransactionSizeError". What is needed is some admin with the power to make such bulky page moves.Anthony Appleyard (talk) 20:19, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

  Thanks for your efforts, Anthony Appleyard. I'm not sure technically who that would need to be, but perhaps someone else does. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 20:29, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

@Anthony Appleyard: can you unprotect the pages involved to a level a template editor can do this? (me). --Moxy 🍁 22:52, 13 April 2020 (UTC)

• @Rotideypoc41352, Sdkb, and Moxy:  Done. Also, page Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) has at least 15000 edits :: no wonder that trying to move it causes snags and system faults. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 03:35, 14 April 2020 (UTC)
• @Rotideypoc41352, Sdkb, and Moxy: I tried to move Wikipedia talk:Introduction to Wikipedia talk:Introduction (historical), and it failed with a system error, likeliest due to long edit history. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 11:38, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Yup same problem...will write am email to someone see if they can breakup the page. I moved it to user page...cant move it back ...will try again when servers are less full.--Moxy 🍁 22:23, 14 April 2020 (UTC)

Perhaps User:Ad Orientem could try....page locked up again before completed.--Moxy 🍁 04:20, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

• At 22:17, 14 April 2020 User:Moxy moved page Wikipedia:Introduction (historical) to User:Moxy Introduction (historical) without leaving a redirect. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 20:08, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

Yup got locked up again before all completed.. oh well. Waiting on an email.--Moxy 🍁 21:27, 15 April 2020 (UTC)

This is a complete mess right now. Who knows whether the redirects are now pointing to User:Moxy Introduction (historical), and whether they're being deleted as cross-namespace. And I'm noticing on my watchlist that stuff is happening at Wikidata that's probably messing things up further. This needed concerted and sustained attention to get completed in one go, and I understand there were unanticipated technical snags, but where do we go to escalate and get someone to fix them? VPT? AN? Do we need a bureaucrat or sysop or something? The problem is just going to get worse the longer it stays in this partially-completed state. {{u|Sdkb}} ^talk 18:30, 16 April 2020 (UTC)

• So everything is exactly how it started off before anything happened.... except for an odd copy in a place no one will ever see it. So back to the start....still waiting on reply to my email. But why not just redirect in the meantime....page history is the only thing not intact...but can be moved when possible if it's even needed. --Moxy 🍁 01:40, 17 April 2020 (UTC)