Wikipedia:Help desk/How to answer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How to answer a question at the Help Desk

• Be friendly, courteous, and helpful at all times.
  • 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.
• 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.
• To reduce the chance of an edit conflict, answer one question at a time by clicking on the edit box for that question.
• At the end of your answer, if you can, provide a link to a page on Wikipedia which has further relevant information. Like this:

by doing this:

<div align="right"> Read more: '''[[This is an example only]]''' </div>