Wikipedia:Help desk/How to answer
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Contents |
[edit] How to answer a question at the Help desk
[edit] The spirit of helpfulness
- Be friendly, courteous, and helpful at all times.
- 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 his 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.
[edit] Questions belonging on the Reference desk
- If you feel a question belongs on the Reference desk, try to answer it anyway, if you can. Keep in mind that 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 this useful tip by inserting this template: {{subst:Wikipedia:Help desk/RD tip 1 (plain)}} (or just {{subst:RD1}} for short). Here's what it says:
-
- Have you tried Wikipedia's Reference Desk? They specialize in knowledge questions, and will try to answer any question in the universe (except how to use Wikipedia, since that's what this Help Desk is for). For your convenience, here's the link: Reference Desk (when you get there, just select the relevant section, and ask away). I hope this helps.
- Two variants exist, {{RD2}} and {{RD3}}, which let you direct editors to a specific reference desk section or article respectively. For more information, see Wikipedia talk:Help desk/RD tip.
-
[edit] Avoiding edit conflict
- To reduce the chance of an edit conflict, answer one question at a time by clicking on the edit link for that question's section.
[edit] Providing links
- At the end of your answer, if you can, provide a link to a page on Wikipedia which has further relevant information. Like this:
Read more: This is an example only
- by doing this:
<div align="right"> Read more: '''[[This is an example only]]''' </div>
- Some editors prefer to use ordinary inline wikilinks, wherever appropriate in their answers.
[edit] How to look up definitive answers
- Many Help desk questions are repetitive, and the answers are already written down somewhere. Showing questioners how you found 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:
