I know you asked about a manual and were directed to the wiki, but you're going to drive yourself crazy finding and reporting all its inconsistencies. Parts of it are hopelessly out-of-date. If you look at the history of the
Screen Parts page, for example, you'll see it was written in January 2007. A lot has changed since then. The "Status Bar" link is in red—indicating a page has not yet been added (and it has been that way since the page was written in July 2007). The resulting page is self-explanatory—"If you want to see content here, you're welcome to add it."
Unfortunately, the situation doesn't favour the type of user who prefers to learn by reading instructions and then going from there. Those of us who prefer to "try it first and ask questions later" are much better off. The program is very powerful, flexible and huge, so the learning curve is steep. But most of it is well designed and therefore reasonably intuitive. That means 80% of it can be learned more effectively just by trying whatever it is you want to do. Having done that, getting information about the other 20% is not so challenging. You'll have a better idea where to look. You'll recognize and ignore the parts of the wiki that are out-of-date. And if you can't find anything, you'll be better able to ask the right question here.
I don't want to discourage you from using the wiki. If no one uses it, it will never improve. Because the program is under continuous development, the wiki tends to do much better with general concepts and how to do things than it does on the details of how the program works and where to find things in the interface.
As you might imagine, most of the questions a new user is likely to ask have been asked and answered in this forum. Do try to find them. But if you can't find the answer you're looking for, don't be timid about asking. We all know how difficult it is to find anything with this forum's search facility. (I wish
that would be improved!)
