Right now if you "mvn help:describe -Dplugin=compiler" you'll see this: This doesn't include the list of goals in this plugin. Similarly, if you "mvn help:describe -Dplugin=compiler -Dmojo=compile" you'll see this: This doesn't describe any of the plugin parameters. The problem here is that the "default" amount of information shown by help:describe is just way too minimal, requiring the user to be clever enough to add -Dmedium or -Dfull to get the information that they'd see for free if they looked at the website. -Dmedium should be the default mode; if people just want to see the minimal amount of information, we could add a new mode called -Dminimal or -Dshort that would include less information. Overall, IMO our objective should be that running mvn help:describe should, by default, give approximately the same information you'd get by browsing to a plugin's site.