HelpThing background: templates, previous work, previous discussion

I thought I'd start a thread providing some background on HelpThing, since its been around for a while, but previous discussion might be missed since it was in another group.

HelpThing was developed by ConceptDawg and launched in 2009 as a member-driven help system (blog post, new feature talk thread). Before HelpThing, members had already developed many help pages on WikiThing. HelpThing added context-specific help pages for every LibraryThing page, linked from the question mark at the top of the page. Members and staff quickly got to work filling out the new pages. It's truly a member-driven project, and has been built mainly through the extensive efforts of a few members. For previous discussions of HelpThing, in the old group, see here.

There is a Style Guide that should be used for HelpThing pages: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing_Style_Guide

There is also a list of all HelpThing pages here:
http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Category:HelpThing

Any page on the Wiki can be made into a HelpThing page by adding {{HelpThing}} at the top.

As of March 2011, HelpThing is now included in Site Search, and adding {{HelpThing}} to any page will index it with the HelpThing search.

There is a HelpThing welcome page, which includes instructions on how to help as well as a list of pages that still need to be developed: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/HelpThing:HelpThing

(Perhaps some of that information would be useful for the group description?)
edited to fix rogue tag

What's the relation of the {{FAQ}} pages to the {{HelpThing}} pages? Should they be merged?

My thought would be let's add {{HelpThing}} to them, that way they'll get picked up in the Help search.

(Note - this is a response to post 2.)
The FAQ pages predate HelpThing. (If you put {{FAQ}} at the top, it made/makes something a FAQ page.) There was some discussion when HelpThing launched about how to integrate them. http://www.librarything.com/topic/70154

Here's the list of pages currently marked as FAQ pages: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Category:FAQ

I'm not sure to what extent information in FAQ has already been copied over to HelpThing pages. I'm also not sure what the consensus is about what should stay in FAQ, or what role FAQ should have. There's probably some research needed about whether any FAQ-labeled sites are actually being updated on a regular basis, and if so, which ones.

Personally, I think there's a role for some easily navigable Frequently Asked Questions pages - with actual questions and answers - alongside more detailed help pages. There are already a number of pages with questions and answers, linked from the Help and FAQ page: http://www.librarything.com/wiki/index.php/Help_and_FAQ
I also think there's a need for a revision of the main Help and FAQ page, to make it more easily navigable and to cover both HelpThing and FAQs more clearly. Maybe we should have a separate thread to talk about and work through the HelpThing/FAQ relationship -- and to figure out what work's already been done there.

Yep. That sounds good, and necessary.

Every time I think there's a simple solution to these things another fifteen wrinkles appear :-)

3> The one downside to that is that they wind up getting both the FAQ and HelpThing stuff on the right side, which can be a bit messy and confusing.

I think we need to look through the existing FAQ pages to see what's there, and what it actually makes sense to get into /label as HelpThing. That may take a little time. But maybe we should just have a separate discussion about working through the FAQ pages (and we may need to distinguish there between the ones labeled "FAQ" and the ones that actually have questions and answers, which may or may not overlap).