FYI: good practices about modal overlays: http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2010/06/17/modal-overlays.aspx

neilk wrote:

The notes I have say that we are supposed to do this:

• help icons open field-specific SHORT (1024) modal overlay.
• modal overlay has no links except link to more help.
• more help is another URL derived from MediaWiki message string

I guess this is obvious, but the link to more help should open in another tab/window to avoid leaving the current page.

Personally, I think that pop-up help with links are annoying. The reason is that the help bubble has to be persistent (either while the cursor is within the bubble or for a certain delay time) in order for you to be able to click the link. As pop-up help are frequently activated by accident, this can force the user into a game of minefield where they have to consciously avoid the help icons. I don't really see anything in our interface that would require more than a sentence or two of help text anyway, so I think it would be nicer for the user if our pop-up help were not persistent (i.e. they disappear as soon as you move the cursor off the icon). If anything requires more than a sentence or two of explanation, were probably doing something wrong anyway. For comparison, Flickr's upload process includes a single pop-up help icon which disaplys 2 sentences to explain what tags are. Nice and simple.

neilk wrote:

Flickr can do that because they are not in the business of making an encyclopedia. If you're happy with your upload, that's all that matters. Flickr is only sorta-kinda in the business of making a shared resource for the world. Something like 2% of Flickr's images are well-tagged. Virtually all images on Flickr are untagged or have terrible auto-numbered titles or other characteristics that make them useless to the rest of the web.

So IMO there legitimately can be at least a few paragraphs of help, for instance, on how to make a good title, and how to avoid common mistakes. There are a lot of things on Commons with titles like "Head shot 001.jpg" and it's impossible for software to detect this is totally useless.

Even if it was possible to summarize all the best advice in a few lines of pop-up help, our theory was that there should be an outlet for those in the community who want to write such guides, and there are some minority of uploaders who want to read them.

neilk wrote:

Also I don't quite understand the 'minefield' interface argument... maybe you can explain it to me in person. (Leaving for the office ASAP).

Yes, but making the interface annoying to accommodate the people who want to write a 5 volume help text doesn't seem sensible to me. The 'minefield' interface argument is usually used when discussing an over-abundance of pop-up menus or pop-up ads (which are both persistent). If you have lots of pop-up menus and pop-up ads scattered across the page, it can be difficult and annoying to get rid of them all so that you can actually see/use the page content. Although this case is not as extreme, it's the same principle. Persistent pop-up anything can be annoying, and since we're moving the pop-up help to be next to the labels, the help text is probably going to be overlapping the textareas in at least some cases. Imagine the user moving their cursor across the page to get to the textarea. In the process they accidentally activate the help text next to the label. The help text stays open even after they have traversed the help icon since the bubble is overlapping the textarea. They then try to click on the textarea, but instead just click the help bubble, or worse, activate the help link by accident. The help bubbles then become annoying mosquitoes that you have to swat away by temporarily moving your cursor to another location.

Do you have any examples of situations in which we would actually need this?

Nevermind, I didn't understand that the help icons were supposed to be clickable rather than hover-over. This has been fixed in revision 82826.

Now any item can get a help icon by appending .addHint(name) to it. The help balloon takes its contents from the item's title attribute. The help balloon text can includes links to either open a page in a new tab or open a modal dialog box with more detailed information, although in most cases I think this will be overkill.

Further info can be found in the comments for the addHint function in mw.UploadWizard.js.