Helpful:About

From Helpful

The basic idea here is to augment information already out there somewhere, pulling it together if necessary, with a healthy dose of pragmatism.

When most content out there is technical document, a summary is nice. When most content on a subject is fuzzy summaries from other versions of the same, a more technical reference is nice. Links to the interesting content out there is good in all cases.

It's probably also useful to consider the most likely audiences for any given text. Wikis like wikipedia focus on a very general public, while many tutorial pages focus on people with a lot of basic knowledge. Something inbetween is nice if it isn't much bother.

If at all possible, try for a style of useful explanations. Consider how some people are good at explaining the gist of something to a friend in a few minutes or a few sentences, being succinct and making you think from a few aspects:

• "Okay, the reason you want this is ..." <quick description of problem and solution>
• "Currently, this practically works out as..." <instructions> and/or <just the relevant cold hard details>
• "...because..." <current context and assumptions, and comparisons where necessary>
• "But when you think about it, it's just a case of ..." <abstraction that makes it easier to remember>

Perhaps it is the need to be brief combined with not saying something stupid that makes it useful, perhaps it is the fact that if you are handed just one or two of these aspects, things tend to be more confusing than educational.

Regardless, it's relatively rare to find anything near this online, and it's exactly that succinct usefulness that I would like pages to grow towards.

Content can have a long-term life here if the answer to "will this be interesting to someone specifically looking for information on the subject" is yes, or at least more positive than "erm, maybe?". Yeah, this is a fuzzy and subjective criterion, but probably also a useful one since it avoids a prohibitive bulk of policy notes.

See also Helpful:Editing

What sort of things can I expect?

Useful information of any type.

In practice, this is also entirely useful for:

• Dumping place for quick notes
• Dumping place for fixes for common problems
• Dumping place for things I don't want to unnecessarily think and write up again and again (e.g. code snippets and commands)
• Place to write summaries (that may or may not be oversimplified (read 'wrong'), in their early (read 'possibly current') versions
• Place to dump scribbles from the piles upon piles of paper I have.

Because of this, a good amount of content is written by reading up a bit, writing text with educated guesses, and only verified and cleaned up later.

This means there are a lot of errors in there before someone ends up polishing it, and it's not all marked with (verify) and it doesn't all sound unlikely. Don't blindly trust, particularly when there are stub, unfinished, and other such markers.

For some part I used this for personal notes, formatted so that other people may also use it, or could be with a little polishing. Feel free to add and start other pages in the style described. See Help:Editing when you want to contribute.

Note: while a page is a stub, the strictness/minimalism/structure doesn't apply much yet -- after all, you should be able to research something you didn't know about yet.