Wikipedia talk:Help namespace

Historical pages in Help namespace

I have been looking into the labyrinthine mess that is enwiki's documentation and help pages (whether in this namespace or elsewhere), and it leaves me wondering about a few things. Among them is, should we be keeping historical pages in the Help namespace? I think we should not, mainly for two reasons. From a maintenance point of view, it makes it much harder to keep track of our help pages and to improve the current situation in which we are; and from a new editor point of view, what pages are actually helpful or not should be as clear as possible, as to make our already incredibly steep learning curve a tiny bit less brutal. Keeping there troves of useless stuff about the former Books namespace or deprecated citation styles is really not conducive to the stated goals of the Help namespace as stated on WP:HELPNS and H:ABOUT. Choucas 🐦‍⬛ 14:43, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

There was a proposal for the creation of a "Historical namespace" many years ago to no avail. That said there are many more metapedians now a days that have the will and time to makes this happen. Basic original objections were Help and Wiki namespace redirects would have to be fixed on thousands of project pages (would leave redirects in talks) .....and what would qualify to move out of {{historical}}, {{superseded}} and {{dormant}} pages?... for instance do we move superseded policies to historical namespace? @FaviFake: maybe a timesink you may like? Moxy🍁 15:36, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the ping, but this sounds like the opposite of what I'd want to do. I think we should delete the Help namespace and move all the pages it contains to the WP: namespace. The solution is not to create a third projectspace... FaviFake (talk) 16:33, 7 June 2026 (UTC)

Honestly, the more I think about it the more I believe the solution might lie in between. A "Historical" namespace would be very convenient to have, and would actually greatly facilitate folding Help into Wikipedia namespace. It might also allow for some thinning of all the accumulated stuff in WP, that is hindering sorely needed clean-up. Choucas 🐦‍⬛ 20:49, 7 June 2026 (UTC)