Help talk:Procedures

Revision history as a git repository

I totally agree with @Lahwaacz: it's not a procedure. To my understanding, the problem is: we don't have "Help:Editing" for advanced users (editors). I.e. "Help:Editing" is newcomer-oriented, "Help:Procedures" is for more or less skilled people, but… its name is "Procedures". cc: @Erus Iluvatar

— Andrei Korshikov (talk) 18:54, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, as I has said in an other answer, there is no place (yet) for advances editing tricks, if there is more content than this specific section we could create Help:Editing/Advanced or something?

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 19:25, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

I agree with Help:Editing/Advanced. I thought about Help:Editing/Tools, but "Advanced" is more generic name.

A bit contradictory question: do we really need to have Help:Procedures? To my perception, Help:Procedures is exactly about advanced editing tricks… — Andrei Korshikov (talk) 19:39, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

To me the title is appropriate as the content is not strictly describing "Advanced" editing techniques, e.g. Help:Procedures#Fix broken package links is not complicated, just a checklist for a recurrent maintenance task that most people outside the maintenance team will never see.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 19:47, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

is not complicated

that most people outside the maintenance team will never see

These two quotes are contradictory :)) I.e. you've said the very reasons I think "Procedures" may be "Advanced". For me, "advanced" does not mean "use fancy MediaWiki tricks, external tools / scripts, etc.", in my opinion "advanced" means "think in another layer of abstraction". I.e. Help:Editing is about "how to put my two cents into a page" ("newcomer-oriented") and "advanced" is about the wiki as a whole (usually, "maintenance team"-oriented). Very opinionated, of course :) — Andrei Korshikov (talk) 20:52, 25 January 2026 (UTC)

Hmm, I get what you mean, to explain what I had in mind I'll make a physical analogy: for me it's the difference between walking 42 km, and running a marathon.

You won't see most people walk 42km for fun, but aside of health issues it's not "complicated" to do so, just time consuming. Running a marathon though, is not easy for a layman without training.

Hence why to me there is nothing "Advanced" in following most of the procedures, but I don't expect infrequent contributors to need them. Meanwhile answering "who made that change" which has no "one click/built-in" solution gets sorted as "Advanced" in my head.

One advanced trick that I don't remember us documenting and would fit is having a list inside a Template:Note, Template:Tip, Template:Warning when there is also a link with a = in it that forces the usage of a numbered parameter: it needs a self-closing <nowiki/> at the top.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 10:34, 26 January 2026 (UTC)

I see and agree)

Then, we have two advanced topics right now, so, if noone will say "NO!!111", then in a couple of weeks "Help:Editing/Advanced" will exist:)

Anyway, "Help:Editing/Advanced" looks very reasonable (for me), and maybe we will recall more suitable topics for it in the future…

— Andrei Korshikov (talk) 17:47, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

One more trick that popped on IRC that I don't see documented but could possibly qualify as "advanced" is the handling of italics inside single quotes, which needs padding as such: '<nowiki/>''italicized''<nowiki/>'.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 08:22, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

For the record, I think I have a couple of things to share. At first, I have "sync" scrypt, which downloads all wiki pages in wikitext format for a given category. Local wikitexts are very useful for (complex) grep searches.

At second, I have a script which fixes template casing (e.g. "Ic" -> "ic", etc.). I believe I do it wrong, but I hope that someone will replace my solution with, I don't know, WikiMonkey one?.. — Andrei Korshikov (talk) 13:16, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

FWIW, the section might fit in Help:Browsing although it would be the only source-based approach for editors. — Lahwaacz (talk) 11:10, 1 February 2026 (UTC)

No, I disagree. To my understanding, we are talking about fancy editing tricks. Of course "browsing" is the first (and, frankly speaking, the most important) part of editing, but it is too formal:) Anyway, if some form of browsing is needed for editing only, then… it's about editing:) IMO, of course. — Andrei Korshikov (talk) 13:03, 6 February 2026 (UTC)

Yeah, in this case I think trying to split advances usage between Reading and Editing would not be beneficial.

-- Erus Iluvatar (talk) 18:36, 6 February 2026 (UTC)