Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Help:Simplified tutorial

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the miscellaneous page below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the discussion was: userfy. See User:TylerMagee/Simplified tutorial. (non-admin closure) Extraordinary Writ (talk) 21:00, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Help:Simplified tutorial

A badly written and confusing tutorial, produced by a brand new editor who has since been blocked for disruptive editing and a general lack of competence. Apart from the obvious point that brand new editors with massive competence issues should not be telling other people what to do the text of this tutorial is useless and would not help any new editor getting started.

The tutorial starts with a two paragraph introduction, the first paragraph "helpfully" tells us that wikipedians are human, while the second is a massive bold notice about a mark-up language that Wikipedia doesn't use, which incorrectly tells readers that the text is written in mediawiki (as far as I'm aware the markup language has always been called wikitext).

The next section is "Practicing editing" which includes the good suggestion to practice in your personal sandbox, and the terrible advice to create pages on Test Wikipedia. Test wikipedia is used for testing new versions of mediawiki, writing articles there is a terrible idea for all kinds of reasons (the devs reserve the right to delete everything without notice, all the templates you need won't exist, you'll be using an experimental and often broken version of mediawiki, if you create a page an importer will be needed to move it over here etc).

The next section is "Start an article" which contains the confusing instruction that you can create a new article by Open a invalid link that looks like a normal Wikipedia article URL, that's not something I would expect to see in a simplified tutorial. It tells newcomers to use Articles for Creation but doesn't explain how. The fact that new editors won't be able to create main space pages is given as a footnote after most of the instructions. This section also contains the statement If somebody tries to create a new page outside the "Draft" namespace, the page may be moved to the Draft namespace., which is confusing without context as to what would cause a page to be moved to draft space (moving all new pages to draftspace regardless of their quality was one of the things that the creator was blocked for). As a final point creating new articles is about the most complex piece of content creation you can do on this site, we shouldn't be telling newbies reading a simplified tutorial to jump straight into creating a new page.

The final section is "Format text (WIP)" which says that you use apostrophes to make bold and italic text (again, without explaining how) then directs you to look in the creator's sandbox for examples of formatting.

About a half the text here is so poorly written and confusing that any newbie looking at it isn't going to have a clue what it's saying, a quarter is blatantly wrong and the remainder is pointless waffling that doesn't add anything of value. This tutorial provides no information on any of Wikipedia's core policies and guidelines (like verifiability, Notability, Reliable sources ...) which isn't surprising given that the creator doesn't seem to understand them. Anyone trying to use this as a guide for getting started is going to be left confused and with major gaps in their knowledge. I suppose this title might make a good redirect to something, but given the number of help pages we have for beginners (WP:The wikipedia adventure, Help:Getting started, Help:your first article, Help:Introduction etc) I'm not sure where you would point it, especially since I'm not seeing any of them actually trying to be a simplified tutorial. 192.76.8.80 (talk) 19:52, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Created on behalf of an IP editor, due to page protection. ScottishFinnishRadish (talk) 19:58, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Userfy for now. We already have a ton of help pages/instruction, so there needs to be a reason to add to that namespace. — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 22:08, 8 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Delete. If this had been a first draft by an editor in good standing, sure, userfy, but as it's unlikely to ever be improved (creator is CIR-blocked) and is of actively negative value as it stands, just delete it. (Sure, userfy and burn any links to it as a second choice, though.) SnowFire (talk) 19:14, 9 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Userfy - Benefit of the doubt, but I have never seen a new user with Twinkle and sub tabs. Interactions with Admin seem disingenuous. Wakelamp d[@-@]b (talk) 13:31, 10 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Userfy doesn't belong in helpspace as is, but not a WP:UP vio. In the unlikely circumstance the user is unblocked they can resume working on it, if not it can sit harmlessly in noindexed userspace. Regards, 78.140.196.174 (talk) 18:34, 14 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Userfy, as it does not belong in this namespace.Jackattack1597 (talk) 19:57, 16 December 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.