Wikipedia:Help desk/How to answer
 | This help page is a how-to guide. It details processes or procedures of some aspect(s) of Wikipedia's norms and practices. It is not one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, and may reflect varying levels of consensus and vetting. |
This page contains guidelines for users who respond to questions posed by other users on the Help desk.
The spirit of helpfulness
- Be friendly, courteous, and helpful at all times.
- Many users who ask questions on the Help desk are new to Wikipedia. We were all new at one time; try to remember what being new was like.
- In the spirit of being helpful, if a user requests an answer on their talk page, please answer on the Help Desk page first and then copy the answer to their talk page. This benefits readers who browse the Help Desk, and lets our volunteers know the question was already answered.
- Please be thorough, but concise.
- Opinions differ as to the appropriate degree of conciseness, in particular on the issue of using shortcut abbreviations:
- Con: Some editors feel that shortcut abbreviations are too difficult for new users to understand.
- Pro: Other editors feel that users need to read the pages our answers link to anyway, and since Wikipedians use so many abbreviations in edit summaries (often without bothering to link them), we might as well condition new users to look up and read the pages behind the shortcuts. To get very far on Wikipedia, every new user probably must learn how to decode the shortcuts.
- Neutral: Still other editors recognize that users are getting free help on the Help desk, and any (accurate) help is better than no help, so it is better to allow individual volunteers to answer in the style they deem appropriate, if that encourages them to keep helping.
- Opinions differ as to the appropriate degree of conciseness, in particular on the issue of using shortcut abbreviations:
How to handle questions belonging on the Reference desk
If you feel a question belongs on the Reference desk, try to answer it anyway, if you can. The Reference Desk is where our field experts and polymaths hang out, so they are much more likely to be able to answer knowledge queries. Therefore, whether you answer the question or not, provide the user with a useful tip by inserting the template {{subst:HD/rd}}, which says:
This page is for questions about editing Wikipedia. Please consider asking this question at the Reference desk. They specialize in knowledge questions and will try to answer any question in the universe (except how to use Wikipedia, since that is what this Help Desk is for). Just follow the link, select the relevant section, and ask away. You could always try searching Wikipedia for an article related to the topic you want to know more about. I hope this helps.
- Two variants exist, {{subst:RD2}} and {{subst:RD3}}, which let you direct editors to a specific reference desk section or article respectively. For more information, see Wikipedia:Help desk/RD tip.
- You could also use other variants of
{{HD}}, which has one variant for each section.
Provide links
When you answer a question, please link any Wikipedia-specific terms in your answer to pages which define them. New users who ask questions on the Help desk may be unfamiliar with Wikipedia jargon, so linking these terms is very helpful. For example: contributions, talk page, link, neutral point of view, etc.
Linking to Wikipedia's documentation is also important for maintaining accuracy. Sometimes our personal recollection of a policy or guideline may be slightly wrong, or we don't word it as clearly as the documentation pages do. The documentation pages represent the currently-best results of many Wikipedia editors who continuously refine Wikipedia's instructions to make them as clear as possible. Directing questioners to these pages ensures they get the most accurate instructions.
Even if the questioner you are responding to appears to be familiar with Wikipedia jargon, you should link your jargon anyway. Other users may read the Help desk now or in the future (for example, by searching the Help desk archives). The more we link the Wikipedia jargon we use, the more we build Wikipedia's internal web of links, over time creating a giant integrated structure of knowledge.
See #How to look up definitive answers for places to find these links.
Check the questioner's contributions
Some questions on the Help desk are unclear, or excessively general. Often you can gain more insight into what the questioner is trying to do by checking a questioner's contributions.
A user's contributions may also give a rough idea of the questioner's level of Wikipedia experience. If a user has few edits, or does not type edit summaries, that might suggest the user is new to Wikipedia and may not be able to understand a highly technical answer.
Consider pinging
New contributors might not put pages on their watchlist, or might not know how to check their watchlist to see if their queries have been answered. Consider using a notification to notify them when you reply to their queries.
Beware of red herrings
Some users may ask how to do specific things, without explaining why they want to do them. Sometimes a better method may exist to reach the questioner's real (but unstated) goal. Try to be aware of when a question may contain a red herring, i.e., a request for help with something other than what the questioner might be better off trying. If the questioner's real motive is not clear, it never hurts to ask: "Why do you want to do X?"
Totally confused questions
Some questions on the Help desk make little or no sense. Often these questions come from users who read about something in a Wikipedia article, and assume they are looking at the official site for the article's subject. This is common because many search engines rank Wikipedia articles high in search results - people who search for company Z may come to the Wikipedia article on it, instead of company Z's official site. To answer these users, use the {{Astray}} standard response template.
Answering
Stock answers
| Help desk templates: |
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Some questions, or types of question, are asked so often that there are now template answers available to save you having to type out the same answer time and time again. These templates, shown in the box to the right, should always be "subst"ed, and have a signature appended with ~~~~. If the answer in the template doesn't 100% match the question, consider substing the template and then editing the text to suit the circumstance.
The template: {{HD}} has a series of parameters and can be used for almost any help desk purpose. See its page for details.
How to look up definitive answers
Many Help desk questions are repetitive, and the answers are already written down somewhere. Showing questioners how you find answers, and linking to documents containing them, may help new users learn to look up their own answers. Knowing how to look things up is, of course, essential for contributing to an encyclopedia, and for mastering Wikipedia's complex rules and procedures. The following resources are helpful for finding answers:
- Help Directory a directory of Wikipedia's how-to and information pages.
- Editor's index to Wikipedia (shortcut: WP:EIW) - it's a long page; try a Ctrl+F search in your Web browser
- Wikipedia:Frequently asked questions (shortcut: WP:FAQ)
- Wikipedia:Tips
- Search the Help desk and its archive pages with Google
- You can use the {{google help desk}} template to search the Help desk and its archives with Google, and embed links to your searches in your answers to questions. (Consider answering the question in addition to giving a search link, as new users may have trouble picking out the relevant search results.) Here is an example of giving just a search link:
- How do I clear my search history?
- See: Search Help desk for: clear search history.
- You can use the {{google help desk}} template to search the Help desk and its archives with Google, and embed links to your searches in your answers to questions. (Consider answering the question in addition to giving a search link, as new users may have trouble picking out the relevant search results.) Here is an example of giving just a search link:
- The {{google custom}} template allows you to create compact links to Google searches on particular Web sites, or on particular subdirectories within a site. See the {{google custom}} template page for examples illustrating how to search on particular parts of Wikipedia.
It's good to search for an answer even if you already know the answer, just to make sure you haven't forgotten something important.