In T231506, we are prototyping several methods for surfacing interesting articles to newcomers who have no editing history. One of the topic matching approaches we want to prototype would do this:

1. Newcomers to select topics of interest from a list (the same list of 27 topics from the welcome survey).
2. For each of the 27 topics, we have a configuration of articles that represent those topics. For instance, if the newcomer selects "Music", the articles representing it might be "Music", "Concert", "Pop music", and "Singing".
3. Then we feed those articles into the "morelike" algorithm to find articles similar to those, and return the ones that have maintenance templates on them.

Essentially, this method "pretends" the newcomer edited some of the core articles around their topics of interest to get suggestions for similar articles.

We want to actually prototype this method in our target wikis and see how it works. Therefore, the task is for our team's ambassadors to fill in this spreadsheet with articles that map to the 27 topics. Each language has a tab, where can be listed up to five articles. There do not need to be five articles for each one. There could 3 or 4 if those adequately represent the topic. The "English example" tab is meant to show what this should look like. That tab is only partially completed because we don't want the English list to bias the other lists too much.

We're not sure how well this will go, and we don't know the best way to choose articles for the list. That's why we want to try it out, and change if we need to.

Here are some thoughts:

• We want to be conscious of cultural biases. Perhaps the articles that are important for "Arts" in the English-speaking world are different than the ones for "Arts" in the Arabic speaking world. That's why we're asking ambassadors to do this for their own wikis, instead of making one English list and linking to articles in each language.
• One useful tool may be the Vital Articles list, maintained on English Wikipedia. This helped me find important articles as I was creating examples for English. If other wikis have something similar, it may be helpful.
• When listing articles, it is probably better to list general, overarching topics instead of specific examples. For instance, it is probably better to list "Painting" instead of "Vincent Van Gogh". This will help us not bias toward specific artists from specific regions. However, if there is something you think is particularly relevant to the culture of your wiki -- for instance, perhaps there is a specific type of art that is important to your culture -- it would be good to list that.