Wikipedia:Help desk/How to ask

This page contains guidelines for users who ask question on the Help desk. These instructions expand on the brief instructions in the Help desk header. Following these instructions will maximize your chances of getting quick, useful answers to your question.

How the Help desk works

The Help desk is a page where Wikipedia users ask questions about using and editing Wikipedia.

Wikipedia does not have a true Internet forum feature with threaded discussion capability, such as you have probably seen on many popular sites such as Google Groups. Instead, the Help desk is an ordinary wiki page, and users type questions and answers with wikitext markup. This can be a problem for users who are very new to Wikipedia, because to use the Help desk, you must first know a few very basic wiki editing commands.

• If you have never edited on Wikipedia before, please read the cheat sheet, and work through the WP:TUTORIAL. You can practice editing in the "sandbox" (a page specifically for users to practice with).

On Wikipedia, every page has an associated talk page, and so does the Help desk. However, unlike most pages on Wikipedia, the Help desk itself functions like a talk page. Therefore, we format our questions and replies according to the talk page guidelines.

Questions remain on the Help desk for several days, possibly accumulating answers from more than one volunteer. Each day, the oldest day's questions on the Help desk move to the Help desk archives. In general, users do not edit the archive pages, but the archive pages remain searchable.

What to ask

On the Help desk, you may ask questions about using and editing Wikipedia.

What not to ask

See Wikipedia:Questions for the other types of questions people ask on Wikipedia, and where to ask them.

Searching for answers yourself

Wikipedia is the world's largest collaborative editing project, and the vast majority of Wikipedia users only rarely have face-to-face contact with other Wikipedia users. Users expect other users to read the friendly manuals and be self-sufficient for the most part, in keeping with the do it yourself nature of the site. Because Wikipedia users lack the ability to speak and gesture to other users, we have to do everything in writing. And write we do - Wikipedia has some of the most extensive online documentation you will see on any Web site (for an overview, see the Editor's index. Written instructions existing for seemingly every aspect of every situation that comes up in the course of using or editing Wikipedia. On the plus side, having so many instructions means anyone can join the project and figure out what to do without needing to sidetrack other users to tutor him or her very much (and thus Wikipedia avoids falling victim to Brooks' law). On the minus side, the sheer size and complexity of the instructions can make Wikipedia rather intimidating to new users.

You don't have read and memorize every last instruction page before you can start contributing to Wikipedia, but you should try to get good at searching for instructions as soon as you can. Once you know how to look up answers to your questions, then you can pretty much do anything here.

Because searching for answers is so important, Wikipedia users have built tools to help. Here is a box of links to Google Search forms that search on specific sites, or parts of Wikipedia, that contain answers to many questions that users ask on the Help desk:

If you have created an account, you may wish to add that box to your user page. You can do that by placing the following wikitext on your user page:

{{Help desk searches}}

Here are some details about the various searches:

Who answers questions

The people who answer questions on the Help desk are other Wikipedia users. Just like you, they are unpaid volunteers. Each has his or her own motivations for answering questions, but in general, the Help desk volunteers are a friendly bunch who enjoy helping others. They view Wikipedia as important collective endeavor, and the Help desk as an important part of the process by which we build Wikipedia. Some Help desk volunteers are interested in the technical and ergonomic aspects of technical support on Wikipedia, seeing what sort of questions other users have, and how we can answer them efficiently.

How to pose your question

This section explains how to word your question so the Help desk volunteers can quickly grasp what you are asking.

In How to Ask Questions the Smart Way, Eric S. Raymond explains just that, giving a number of useful tips for people who ask

See also

• Wikipedia:Help desk/Header - brief instructions that appear at the top of the Help desk
• Wikipedia:Help desk/How to answer
• Wikipedia:Questions
• Wikipedia:Reference desk/header/leftside - creates the standard header of instructions for the Reference desk