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Visually integrate 'related articles' feature more cleanly
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Description

The new 'Related Articles' feature has a couple of things that make it stand out as visually different (and not in a good way) from the rest of a Wikipedia article...

1 - at least in the English Wikipedia, the manual of style calls for sub-headings to use sentence case, that is "Related articles", not "Related Articles". This is a simple fix to change the "A" to a lowercase "a".

2 - The words "Related articles" appear in a slightly different colour and size (and font?) to the other sub-headings. Please make these consistent.

3 - Could you add some words or an icon to visually indicate that, unlike everything else on the page, these three suggestions are machine-generated not manually curated. Wikipedians have gone to a lot of effort over the years to explain to the public that everything on the page is editable, yet this isn't. The design team would probably have good suggestions for how to do that in a clear but unobtrusive way.

4 - It is not normal to have "content" outside of the editable window. Since this is supposed to be a Beta Feature, could you test it as appearing as part of the "See also" section that most (english wikipedia) articles have? This is the logical place to put suggestions for other things. You'd need to carefully visually differentiate from the human-created suggestions (see point 3 above). There would need to be a fallback option for when there is no 'see also' section, of course. If you integrated these 'automatic' suggestions to the manually created section, then you wouldn't even need to have a separate heading called "related articles" - it would be just another facet of the "See also" section.

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As mentioned in: T116676#1877895

Clicking 'random article' gave me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriels,_New_York. The three suggested articles included "Hamlet" .

Interestingly... this is the William Shakespeare kind of Hamlet, not the small-town kind. That indicates to me that these suggestions are based solely on word frequency in the article ("Gabriels is a hamlet in the Town of Brighton in Franklin County, New York...") and doesn't actually check to notice if they are disambiguated in a different direction...

1 - at least in the English Wikipedia, the manual of style calls for sub-headings to use sentence case, that is "Related articles", not "Related Articles". This is a simple fix to change the "A" to a lowercase "a".

It should also be "Related pages" since articles does not apply on non-Wikipedia projects.

2 - The words "Related articles" appear in a slightly different colour and size (and font?) to the other sub-headings. Please make these consistent.

Not sure if this is problematic/intentional - have pulled a designer in to clarify.

3 - Could you add some words or an icon to visually indicate that, unlike everything else on the page, these three suggestions are machine-generated not manually curated. Wikipedians have gone to a lot of effort over the years to explain to the public that everything on the page is editable, yet this isn't. The design team would probably have good suggestions for how to do that in a clear but unobtrusive way.

FYI. They can be edited using {{#related:name of article}}

4 - It is not normal to have "content" outside of the editable window. Since this is supposed to be a Beta Feature, could you test it as appearing as part of the "See also" section that most (english wikipedia) articles have? This is the logical place to put suggestions for other things. You'd need to carefully visually differentiate from the human-created suggestions (see point 3 above). There would need to be a fallback option for when there is no 'see also' section, of course. If you integrated these 'automatic' suggestions to the manually created section, then you wouldn't even need to have a separate heading called "related articles" - it would be just another facet of the "See also" section.

Not sure about how problematic this is and how this ties in with "see also" - a question better raised on the talk page for the feature - but from a technical point of view adding this to "See also" section for all pages is not currently possible without a big overhaul of MediaWiki's current restrictive architecture with regards to content and would cause problems with VisualEditor.

Jdlrobson triaged this task as Medium priority.Dec 14 2015, 6:12 PM
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ping @JKatzWMF @dr0ptp4kt (Adam Baso)

As requested over on T116676, I've now added my various comments on the talkpage of the project: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Reading/Web/Projects/Read_more

@Wittylama thanks! I added some comments on the page linked ^

Jdlrobson claimed this task.

A new design will go out next week - see T122030 - This should resolve all the issues in the original report!
I ask that come next Friday, if you still see problems with the design you open another task to capture any further issues. Thanks!