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The help panel is a feature that allows newcomers to post questions directly to their wiki's help desk while they are in the middle of editing a page.

Pending T206716, this task proposes enabling Anonymous users to use the Editor help panel.

Rationale

An opportunity to track effectiveness of help in encouraging account creation (it has shown to be effective in similar past projects, see T206714)

General requirements

• Platform: This feature will eventually need to exist for both desktop and mobile. Desktop should be built and deployed first.
• Languages: KO and CS (Growth team's target wikis)
• Eventlogging: This feature will need to be instrumented with EventLogging for all interactions.

• A/B testing: This feature should be A/B testable. We might want to test these sorts of things:
  • Having the feature turned on at all for Anonymous users.
  • A version where for Anonymous users are shown a call to action to open the Help desk to ask a question instead of to "Create an account"

Proposed feature design + requirements

• Mocks: Invision (clickable) prototype at https://wikimedia.invisionapp.com/share/XSP2H5Z7ZMY (Click/Tap on this task in the contents screen to view the relevant mocks)
• User is shown the open help panel, but instead of seeing a text-area field and primary call-to-action in the "Ask a question" section of the help panel, they are prompted to create an account
• Upon selecting "Create an account" they will be redirected to the usual Special:CreateAccount page
• If the user has previously made an edit in the article before selecting "Create an account", they will be shown the standard warning dialog about losing all their changes if they proceed.
• Users who successfully create an account should be returned to this edit state with the Help panel open ready for their question