Unfortunately, help pages aren't included in distrubution because MediaWiki supports over 100 languages out of the box and having help in all these languages in the tarball would lead to drastic increase in distro size, which is already significant. However, the installer should be able to download pages in chosen languages from the internet. Repurposing this bug as feature request.

Won't be happening anytime soon.

frank.thommen wrote:

This is a pity because - sincerely - from the user's point of view a Wiki w/o built-in help regarding syntax etc. is a useless piece of software. The WYSIWYG editor only covers very few formatting cases. At least the English documentation should be included out of the box (that's also the case with all other Wikis I have encountered so far). Last but not least I'd expect some easily accessible informations, how the documentation can be added/imported/linked later. This information could be added to the output of the initial setup wizard.

• Bug 23864 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

I think this request makes a lot of sense. Opening it.

See also:

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:PD_help
• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:PD_help/export

And related talk pages.

Note that as a quick solution it's possible (not sure whether this requires changes in core or not) to let links to the Help-namespace become interwiki links to mediawiki.org's Help-namespace.

ideas:

• nuke NS_HELP, create interwiki 'help' to '//www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:$1' (kindaof a hack since it messes with titles/namespaces, might be okay though)

• catch redlinks and make only those fallback to mw.org, first as previous option but preserves the namespace for local custom pages (or overrides) and doesn't create an interwiki.

API request to mw.org, pull all relevant pages, &export, push them back into the local wiki using action=import

Bug 12306 seems a better solution.

(In reply to comment #9)

Bug 12306 seems a better solution.

The two bugs are in contrast, and I think this one is not viable, so for clarity I'm closing it WONTFIX.
If someone really thinks it's a good idea, then reopen it; but it would be nice to have concrete plans about it rather than generic hopes or suggestions, because even the *possibility* that this is considered an aim blocks documentation development via other paths.