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Help desk

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As of 18:13, 1 June 2007 (UTC) I find myself growing strangely addicted to answering questions on the Help desk, and now I have a number of edits there. I've been poking around on wikis since March, 2006, and I feel compelled to share what I have learned. I cannot fully explain why I feel compelled to answer questions on the Help desk, and why I find it enjoyable to do. But I can try.

Throughout the Information technology industry, technical support tends to be a source of perennial complaints from customers, as well as a stressful occupation for support providers (as evidenced by their high burnout rate). Having done my share of end-user support for a couple of technology companies I'm involved with, I can report that it is a very difficult job, at least the way the IT industry typically does it (via telephone, e-mail, or various attempts to set up support Web sites). Very few people aspire to spend their entire careers in technical support. From what I have seen, support often functions as an entry-level technology position, from which people expect to be promoted to more desirable work after paying their dues.

Technical support is typically a huge problem for IT companies. It's hugely expensive to provide, and customers tend not to like the support service they receive. It's lose-lose all around. It's an Elephant in the room kind of problem. For some reason, I tend to notice those elephants and wonder what, if anything, can be done about them.

On Wikipedia, support is quite different. It is actually, and almost inconceivably, fun. In two decades during which I have often sought support from other organizations, and endured a few stints of providing support to customers via telephone, e-mail, and ticket systems, I have never seen another support technology that works as well as the Help desk. The wiki model, as MediaWiki implements it, is just an insanely great tool for providing support. (I should say, it is an insanely great tool to enable a community of volunteers to provide support.)

Given the massive scale of the support problem throughout the IT industry, I wonder if the Wikipedia community is sitting on something like a metaphorical gold mine here without consciously realizing just how good this is.

Why support works better on Wikipedia

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So what accounts for the efficiency of support on Wikipedia?

  1. You don't have to answer every question, you don't have to answer immediately, and you only have to answer what you find interesting.
    • There are many eyeballs reading the Help desk. Almost every question gets some sort of answer eventually. You can skip the questions you know nothing about; you can come back later if something comes to mind; and you can wait for someone else to answer first, and then add on to their answer. This is different than providing support over a telephone in real time, which is like taking pop quizzes all day long, and flunking some of them.
  2. Partial answers are still useful.
    • Even if you don't know the complete answer to a user's question, if you can provide more clues about it, or improve the user's question by adding links to pages the user merely alluded to, that may enable someone who does know the answer to understand the question faster.
  3. Incorrect answers are not necessarily fatal.
    • If you make a mistake in your answer, another editor is likely to correct your mistake fairly quickly. Then you can <strike> it, to protect others from following the red herring. Occasionally, an incorrect answer may actually be useful, for example if it inadvertently calls attention to a common mistake, which other editors can then explain.
  4. Almost all the answers are already written down somewhere.
  5. Wikitext is a rich language for answering questions; in particular, we can easily link to pages containing canned answers.
    • The Editor's index is especially handy for this. For example, if a questioner asks almost any question relating to talk pages, the Help desk volunteer can cite WP:EIW#Talk_p, which links to a list of links to pages that answer almost every question about talk pages that arises. The Editor's index has similarly informative entries for almost every topic that arises in the course of editing on Wikipedia. --Teratornis 18:09, 12 September 2007 (UTC)
  6. The Help desk format is an efficient tool for keeping questions and answers organized.
    • All the answers stay with their questions, and then all the questions go into the Help desk archive. All users can keep track of each other's answers to a question, and add missing information as necessary. This is far better than using e-mail, which separates the answers into separate messages, making it difficult to see the current status of all the answers collectively. E-mail also suffers from the horrific practice of top-posting, and we don't allow that nonsense on Wikipedia.

How to make Wikipedia's support even better

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Nothing is perfect, which means everything can be improved. Here are some ideas for improving Wikipedia's support. Well, actually at first I'm just writing down some things that one could point to as deficiencies. I might not have any good ideas about how to fix them. We could think about trying to set up one or more forms for entering questions on the Help desk (in addition to allowing free-format entry as we do now), but this might just confuse questioners more, by adding more options for the user to slog through.

  1. Users have to know a few things about how to formulate good questions. If users lack such knowledge, they might make these mistakes:
    • Asking how to do something which is merely one of several approaches to their (unstated) real goal, and not necessarily the best approach, setting up a red herring to mislead Help desk volunteers.
    • Asking questions in the wrong place. The Help desk is for questions about using Wikipedia, but it gets many questions more suitable for the Reference desk, as well as questions that seem intended for completely different Web sites.
    • Failing to give enough background about what they already tried.
    • Requesting help in vague and general ways, without being specific about what they have tried or want to do.
    • Using incorrect, non-standard, or ambiguous terminology to describe their problem or actions.
    • Just being generally incoherent. A few questions seem understandable only to the questioner.
    • Posting questions that require respondents to do substantial work just to understand the question (such as reading lengthy discussions that occurred elsewhere, registering user accounts on other wikis, etc.).
  2. Users have to know a few things about editing on Wikipedia to format good questions. New users often make these mistakes:
    • Not creating a new section heading for their question.
    • Not linking to whatever page or article they mean.
    • Not signing their questions.
    • Formatting their questions incorrectly.
    • Not replying after the answers to show that the answers helped, or that they saw the answers.
    • Posting their e-mail addresses or telephone numbers.
    • A user may attempt plain text formatting, with manual hard returns and so on, which MediaWiki runs into a paragraph unless lines are indented.
    • A user may indent the first line in what should be a body text paragraph, causing it to format as a code example.
  3. The Help desk is brittle against incorrect tags which can cause parts of the page to disappear and so on, although usually an experienced editor will notice the problems and correct them fairly quickly. In the meantime, questioners may be unable to use the Help desk.
  4. The Help desk provides no automatic notification to questioners when each answer to their question appears.
    • As questions age, it becomes hard for Help desk volunteers to know whether a questioner is still monitoring the Help desk for answers.
    • Questioners may not understand that several successive answers may appear, each with a longer delay. Given that later answers may add important information the early answers missed, it's important for a questioner to continue checking for answers "long enough." However, a questioner cannot know how long is long enough, because new answers may continue to appear even after a Help desk page moves into the archive (an archived Help desk page remains editable indefinitely). If the Help desk had some mechanism to positively notify the questioner of new answers (such as an e-mail notification), the questioner would be much less likely to miss the later answers. Of course bugzilla provides such notifications.
    • See mw:Extension:LiquidThreads for a proposed discussion system for MediaWiki 2.0, which may provide such notifications (among other benefits).

22:43, 18 May 2008 (UTC): I'm editing a page of extended instructions for users:

which will supplement the necessarily too-brief instructions in:

Tools

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Also see:

It might be useful to design a Firefox extension similar to this, but specifically for Help desk volunteers:

For example, the editor window context menu could contain items that insert links to standard response templates at the cursor position.

Templates

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Plan

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Help desk questions tend to be repetitive, as Google search on the Help desk shows. I would like to create a set of templates to generate boilerplate answers to common Help desk questions.

First, identify the existing Help desk templates. I know about these:

We could also use templates to answer these frequently asked questions:

  • How do I create a new article?
  • Why was my article deleted?
  • How do I clear the Wikipedia search box?
  • How do I add a hit counter?
  • How do I start my own wiki?
  • To-do: add more items to this list.

Answers to all these questions are already in several documents (for example, see WP:VFAQ, User:John Broughton/Editor's Index to Wikipedia, etc.). However, citing one template could be faster than looking up the answers and writing a coherent reply each time a question reappears.

We could also use templates to tell people how to formulate coherent questions:

  • Please sign your questions.
  • Please title your questions.
  • Please refer to pages as links.

Template to-do

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16:53, 8 July 2007 (UTC): another user is working on a {{Creation}} template:

Help desk template category

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17:19, 20 April 2008 (UTC): These two categories contain some or all of the Help desk templates:

Make a category for Help desk templates, since we have more now:

I made the category. Now put a bunch of templates into it, starting with: {{Help desk templates}}.

Implementation

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Attempt to make a table to list the standard response templates suitable for use on the Help desk. this is a problem since there is currently no consistency in the design of the (few) existing templates (as of 16:53, 8 July 2007 (UTC)). Model my table after the tables here:

Code What it makes Usage instructions
{{Resolved}}
Resolved
 Template talk:Resolved
{{Dyoh}}
Please do your own homework.
Welcome to Wikipedia. Your question appears to be a homework question. I apologize if this is a misinterpretation, but it is our aim here not to do people's homework for them, but to merely aid them in doing it themselves. Letting someone else do your homework does not help you learn nearly as much as doing it yourself. Please attempt to solve the problem or answer the question yourself first. If you need help with a specific part of your homework, feel free to tell us where you are stuck and ask for help. If you need help grasping the concept of a problem, by all means let us know.
 Template talk:Dyoh
{{RD1}} Have you tried Wikipedia's Reference Desk? They specialize in knowledge questions and will try to answer just about 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. I hope this helps. Wikipedia:Help desk/RD tip
{{Creation}} ?

Sub-pages

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The Help desk has a number of subpages:

I can search the Wikipedia talk:Help desk archives with a {{Google custom}} search, using some tricks from Help:Magic words#Namespaces and URLs and Help:Variable#Constants to make the template expression portable:

Type this To get this What it produces, or searches for
{{Google custom|{{SERVERNAME}}{{localurl:Wikipedia talk:Help desk}}||Search Wikipedia talk:Help desk and its archives}} Search Wikipedia talk:Help desk and its archives Blank form to search the Wikipedia Help desk talk page and its archives

I added this search link to: Wikipedia talk:Help desk/archivelist.

Shortcuts

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05:04, 29 April 2008 (UTC): It's helpful to have lots of fine-grained shortcuts on various manual pages such as the Editor's index, Wikipedia:Frequently asked questions, Wikipedia:Manual of style, etc. That way, when we look up answers to questions on the Help desk, we can easily copy and paste shortcuts back to our Help desk replies, and link them.

I asked User:Manors to add shortcuts to the WP:FAQ. Which he started. See:

I added a lot of shortcuts to the Editor's index. However, I had some trouble with the {{Shortcut}} template - it didn't work correctly on a second-level list item. See:

I'm making a {{Shortcut compact}}, with my initial hacking in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2.

Shortcut template testing

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This is a test of my template which was initially in User:Teratornis/Sandbox2 (but then I put it in {{Shortcut compact}}). I'm having a little trouble figuring out the proper margins. If I use the same margins as are in the {{Shortcut}} template, templates on successive lines push the lower ones to the left. I.e., the boxes don't want to stack up vertically, so the first one floats to the right, and the next one only floats to the right as far as it can without colliding the top and bottom margins.

I want the top and bottom margins to be zero to eliminate overlap problems. I guess.

  • A list item.
  • Another list item.
  • Another list item with a standard {{Shortcut}} after it.
    Shortcut
  • Another list item.
  • Another list item.
  • Another list item.
  • Another list item.
    • This is a subitem with a shortcut to appear after it on the next line.
       Shortcut:   WP:EIW#Learn 
    • This is a subitem which should have the shortcut.
    • A subitem.
    • A subitem.
    • This is a subitem with a shortcut to appear after it on the next line.
       Shortcut:   WP:EIW#Community 
      • A subsubitem which should also have a shortcut.
    • A subitem.
  • A list item

Float problems

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For some annoying reason, {{Shortcut compact}} refuses to float to the right when I use it on the Editor's index. I pasted a chunk of the Editor's index into User:Teratornis/Sandbox2 so I can illustrate the problem and ask for help about it. I asked for help here:

16:50, 29 April 2008 (UTC): it looks like User:Davidgothberg tried some changes to {{Shortcut compact}}, but did not find the problem. See his net changes. Since I have also seen this float problem with {{Shortcut}}, perhaps someone has reported similar problems before. I should try searching for clues.

MediaWiki API

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21:26, 18 May 2008 (UTC): the Help desk gets some questions that might be answerable by using the MediaWiki API. For example:

To-do: learn how to use the MediaWiki API. Links:

Top posters

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Occasionally on the Help desk, someone identifies the top posters:

As of 17:43, 30 May 2008 (UTC), the top three posters on the Help desk for all time have these numbers of edits:

  1. MacGyverMagic: 2963
  2. Teratornis: 2901
  3. PrimeHunter: 2504

June 12, 2008 and August 1, 2008 updates

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06:57, 12 June 2008 (UTC): It looks like I moved into first place, with this edit. I believe the following three users are the top three Help desk posters for all time; here are their Help desk edit counts as of 20:32, 1 August 2008 (UTC):

  1. Teratornis: 3213
  2. MacGyverMagic: 2963
  3. PrimeHunter: 2678

However, that edit count tool counts all edits. I have some minor edits on the Help desk, and I don't know if MacGyverMagic has more or fewer minor edits. But since MacGyverMagic is not actively editing now, and I'm still answering questions, I've been extending my lead.

March 3, 2009

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08:49, 3 March 2009 (UTC): time for an update. Interiot's edit count tool doesn't seem to be working correctly now, but soxred93's tool works.

  1. Teratornis: 4179
  2. PrimeHunter: 3411
  3. MacGyverMagic: 3333
  4. Fuhghettaboutit: 1981
  5. ukexpat: 1045

Note: I'm only sure about the top three posters. This page only ranks users among the most recent 50,000 edits to the Help desk.

22:04, 15 March 2009 (UTC): I learned about another tool that appears to rank the all-time posters:

Edits to Wikipedia:Lead section

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07:23, 3 June 2008 (UTC): I edited WP:LEAD in response to a question on the Help desk. Another user reverted my edits, explaining his reasoning in Wikipedia talk:Lead section#Edits by User:Teratornis related to "editing the lead section". I replied at length, summarizing the arguments of John Brogan and Jakob Nielsen against the passive voice (especially with missing actor) and in favor of lists. If the other editors don't want the WP:LEAD page to be understandable by new users, I'll see if I can move my edits to the FAQ. Perhaps I will need to start a general campaign to promote clear writing in Wikipedia's internal document pages, since a lot of people who contribute to those pages probably have not studied the advice of communication experts.

See also

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  • How To Ask Questions The Smart Way - a widely-cited, if rather lengthy, essay about how to ask for help. Mostly it's about how to research your questions before you ask for help, instead of just expecting other people to do all the work for you.
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