Commons:Help page maintenance

Wikimedia Commons is a multilingual project, so information needs to be available in different languages spoken by the contributors of Wikimedia Commons. Writing and translating of the help pages, policy pages, and such is done best with some overview of the structure and the importance of the pages in order to avoid duplicate work. These pages need constant maintenance updates in order to be really useful. Thus there is a need for a central Help page maintenance with some dedicated rules.

Help page sections

1. Basic pages
2. Legal pages
3. Further key help pages
4. Central community pages
5. Additional pages
6. Wikimedia Commons interface

Writing of pages

1. Do not create unnecessary duplicates: Keep the number of pages in Commons- and Help-namespace low. Help/policy/project/collaboration pages and similar pages that are not specific to Wikimedia Commons itself have no place in Wikimedia Commons. Especially, pages about the MediaWiki software are avoidable duplicates and will be deleted or moved to MediaWiki as there is a multilingual, always up to date MediaWiki handbook.
2. When you create a new page: If you want to start writing a page about a topic, please always check if there is a similar page already in existence. There are also a lot of duplicates and very similar pages. See if it makes sense to merge them.
3. Name of pages (namespace): Tutorials and technical help articles should be placed in the Help-namespace. Policy pages, project pages, legal pages, Commons maintenance pages and other pages that don't fit elsewhere should be placed in the Commons-namespace.

Translation of pages

1. Start with updated pages: Do not start a translation of a page which is outdated even in English. Otherwise you will waste your valuable time. Please always improve in such cases the English original first. This does not reduce importance of translation of various help pages in to your own language. Please help us in making this section more informative and updated so other translator will know where to focus their energy.
2. Start with main pages: Starting a new translation with the key introduction pages is strongly recommended as this is what users will see and need first when they join Wikimedia Commons. So, if they are able to read the introduction pages in their native language, they are more likely to be attracted by Wikimedia Commons. Of course these pages have a high visibility, so it is very likely that more people will join the translation work of the other pages into a given language.
3. Language Bar: Single translations into different languages are all interconnected with a custom {{Lang-NAME}} template which is displayed on top of every page and gives links to all single versions of that page using native language names for description.
4. "Commons-ISOCODE" rule and a local category for each language: The translated help pages themselves are all categorized below a Commons-ISOCODE category. For English, this help page root category would be Category:Commons-en which itself is inside Category:Commons (please don't add it to the English language subtree, so e.g. Category:Commons help is for English help articles only).
5. Commons' global common categories: There are several categories below Category:Commons that don't get translated (all categories below Category:Commons maintenance content, which is used for Commons' global common maintenance), as it would make the maintenance of Wikimedia Commons impossible. For the full Commons meta category scheme, have a look at Commons:Category scheme Commons maintenance/en. Please add subcategories there if you need to create them and label them with their template.
6. Commons' global common pages: Other central Wikimedia Commons maintenance pages like Commons:Deletion requests are not translatable and are necessarily in English only. However you are welcome to translate the header of these pages in your language of choice so that people get the basic help information to this page in their language.
7. Discussion pages: There are several central discussion pages like Commons:Village Pump that are not translatable themselves. However it is encouraged to set up these kinds of similar pages in other languages and linking them as described above. However, do not blindly create such a page. If you create such a page in your native language you have to maintain it and take care that people get an answer there in a reasonable time. So, if the last discussion on such a page is more than one month ago, its link in the language template gets moved into a separate section (see below) until some people start using it again regularly. This visual separation and hint is necessary as people will be frustrated otherwise as their questions at that page do not get noticed by others.
8. Protected pages: Make a request at the talk page, and add {{Editprotected}} template. Administrators will check for protected edit requests to process.

Translation maintenance rules

If a translation of an often translated page does not get updated, it is not helpful any longer and pure clutter. It will lead in the worst case to confusion, user failures and frustration. So, in order to give the reader a reasonable choice, in order to prevent people from getting the impression that only the English page is up to date (and thus harming the other up to date translations), and in order to reduce clutter, there is a need for some inclusion rules in the language template on top of the page:

1. If a language template contains more than twenty page links and a translated page linked there is not updated and/or reviewed within one month after the last edit to the English version, its entry in the Lang-template will be moved to a separate section below the up to date translations as demonstrated in Template:Lang-mp until it is again updated and the editor/reviewer confirms that it is up to date (see next point).
2. Pages get reviewed in the relevant translation section (see above). A user that updated/reviewed a page will give a brief vote with his signature after the language code of the relevant translation (and will remove an eventual old signature from there).