Template talk:Useful links

Feedback?

I plan on posting about this elsewhere on Wikipedia, but I am trying to get a feel for how much a collection of useful links like this will be used. The purpose of this template is so you may easily navigate Wikipedia from your userpage. Do you find this helpful, or have any comments or questions? Hopefully this will require little maintenance, as a proposal probably needs to be passed by the community for a new page that's important enough to merit inclusion here to become widely used.

I tried to categorize every useful page (or at least, every page on a general topic where you can quickly get to a useful page) into six sections. Note that the full article name will appear when you mouse over the link; I made it a point to provide the page you will be linking to rather than just the abbreviations, since I find it immensely helpful when browsing through the list. The "Daily pages" category is intended for pages that require maintenance by experienced editors on a daily basis (for example, noticeboards, reference desks, and deletion discussions). The "Things to do" section lists tasks that require some time to complete but are useful to the community--basically, stuff that you can do to help out when you are bored. Pages like Good Article Nominations, backlogged tasks, and NewPage patrol are included here.

"Resources" links to pages that you might like to visit when you have to look something up. Reference tools like Wikipedia:How to copy-edit, Wikipedia:Template messages, and Wikipedia:Department directory are listed here. The "Policy" section lists oft-used policies and guidelines. It was a little hard to determine which were notable and which weren't, but as a general rule, I didn't include essays or guidelines that are very rarely used. Examples here are Wikipedia:Verifiability, Wikipedia:Username policy, and Wikipedia:Mediation.

Next, we have the "Administrators" category. I am not an administrator myself, but I tried to get a good feel of what pages Administrators (and pretty much only administrators) often use. Example pages here are Category:Requests for unblock, Wikipedia:Deletion guidelines for administrators, and certain parts of the Wikipedia:Administrator's noticeboard. The last section lists useful "External links"; I based my selection off of what I personally found to be useful. Examples include an edit counter and something on article statistics.

This took me a while to do and I like to think I was very thorough, but I may very well have missed some pages. Feel free to add any that you feel are important enough to the list, in the format of the other ones. All comments here are appreciated. Cheers! —Pie4all88 (talk) 22:39, 9 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I also wanted to mention that I tried to use the most descriptive abbreviations out there, but I also tried to take into account the shorter abbreviations if they are more commonly used. Oh, and I've been looking for a list of standards for template names, but with no luck so far. If this page should be named Template:Usefullinks or something, feel free to move it. —Pie4all88 (talk) 05:28, 10 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comments

I hope you'll add the editor's index to Wikipedia to the list of resources.
Are you designing this for relatively experienced editors or relatively inexperienced? For the former, the shortcuts aren't going to be that useful (understandable); for the latter, I wonder how many experienced editors already have already created something like this, and won't be interested in this template? (Personally, I suggest aiming it at less experienced editors - which would mean dropping the section on admin stuff, and changing the links to show an explanatory word, like "Maintenance", rather than a shortcut like "CAT:M".) -- John Broughton (♫♫) 16:55, 15 July 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I love this box. Hover for the full title!

To editors Pie4all88 and John Broughton: I think changing the title would make it even more useful:

Useful links: Hover over the acronym for the full title it represents

Mnn, now I think the following looks better:

Useful links (Hover over the acronym for the full title it represents)

I didn't expand this navbox for a very long time. I would have treasured it much sooner if the title bar had told me it explained acronyms without going through the shortcut to the page! Any comments? —Geekdiva (talk) 02:48, 28 August 2016 (UTC)[reply]