Wikipedia:Helpbox

This essay contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia users. Essays may represent common ideas, or ideas that many users would not support. They are not rules. Think carefully about what they say before following them.

A helpbox displays a concise overview of a topic in a small box on the screen. A helpbox acts as a condensed reference card (or "crib sheet") to quickly summarize a topic.

The use of helpboxes provides rapid, brief information to users, especially to long-term users who might have forgotten some of many options encapsulated into the condensed helpbox. Newer users might prefer to read the full help-pages, or tutorials, with numerous examples of each option.

A helpbox is limited, in size, to act as a concise reference card, rather than as a full tutorial with extensive explanations of each feature. When a topic is very large, then the helpbox could link to other sub-helpboxes, to keep each helpbox relatively short, but cover most aspects of a large topic.

Helpbox pages, such as {{wikitext}} are short reference cards to remind users about markup format or template parameters (see: {{convert/help}}).