The Article guidance initiative aims to develop new approaches that support editors in creating initial, well-structured contributions to Wikipedia that align with community policies and content quality. The intention is to help new editors easily understand and apply the existing practices and policies, and navigate the task of starting a new article with ease. It is also meant to reduce the workload for administrators, enabling them to safeguard article quality more effectively.
Goals
The goal of the "Guidance for Article and Section Creation" initiative is to improve the effectiveness of article and section creation activities in order to improve the quality of the new content created and reduce the associated reviewing workload. Understanding these activities as part of an ecosystem, we want to improve the situation for all users in the different roles involved. In particular:
- Editors will create quality content more easily.
- Admins will influence article quality at scale and spend less time dealing with low-quality content.
- Readers can feel part of the community and get familiar with the content creation process to eventually participate in it.
Currently, editors need to make a significant effort to create new content from scratch. As a result, reviewers have to process many low quality contributions and revert/fix them. Finally, readers see content creation as a mystery, which makes it harder for them to decide to become contributors in the future.
The ideal result would be to get a higher quality level for new contributions without causing a decline in contributions.
Approach
For this initiative, we want to explore ways to facilitate the process of creating good quality contributions. Assisting editors while they create contents, instead of adding barriers that make their contribution even more complex. We want assistance to be relevant to the specific user context, and to capture best practices and recommendations from each editing community.
Principles
- Learn by doing. User actions feel like progress towards creating the article (their goal). Not a qualifying test or a pre-requisite read of the documentation (boring).
- Keep the user in control. The user takes the initiative about what to create. The system provides options, context and assistance without feeling an interruption or too narrowly guided.
- Freedom of editing.Favor direct manipulation of contents. Users can make some progress leaving things incomplete, jump elsewhere to get some information, and come back to complete a previous activity. Proposals by the system can be adjusted by the user as they do with other contents. Content creation is an organic process, not rigid workflows.
- Reuse of previous efforts. Recreating existing practices (automating the boring steps) helps users to quickly reuse existing relevant contents and apply community best practices without the requirement to know they exist in advance and the effort to find them.
- Multiplatform. Supporting mobile and desktop web to reach as many people as possible.
- Apt for monolinguals. Not dependent on content being available in other languages.
- Enhancing existing tools over inventing new ones.
- Sustainable for the wiki ecosystem. Increasing knowledge quality without increasing moderator burden.
Past initiatives
These issues have been discussed in the past and several proposals have been made by the community and by Wikimedia Foundation teams.
Many of the past attempts seem based on the following approaches:
- Provide users documentation to read in advance such as "Your first article" on English Wikipedia
- Send users to a preliminary workflow to check if the user idea qualifies for an article before an actual page is created. For example, this workflow diagram captures a proposal for improving the current Articles for Creation (AfC) on English Wikipedia.
These approaches may work for some users. However, other users may feel they are a detour from their goal to create content.
Some past proposals and projects that can be useful as a reference:
- New article workflow proposal
- Mbabel supports the generation of outlines based on the information available on Wikidata.
- Article Placeholder
- Reasonator
Status
Current focus:
- Support the workflow for the initial intervention: T414409: Article Creation Guidance: Initial intervention workflow (list of proposed improvements)
- Invite communities to adapt the general guidelines to their specific needs: T422609: Invite pilot communities to review the outlines in the test instance in English
- Deployment and starting experiment. Available in:
For a more detailed overview of other related activities, the overall plan is described below.
Plan
As part of the Wikimedia Foundation Annual plan 2025-26 we want to progress in this area by considering some of the previous and new ideas. This Epic ticket represents this initiative and can be useful to group more specific efforts in this area. These may include:
Learning:
- Design explorations: T397629: Design exploration: concepts for article and section creation guidance
- Design Research: T392564: [FY25/26-WE2.1] Research needs and opportunities around Article Creation Guidance
- Analytics: T397400: Analize article and section creation issues
- Learn from ideas explored for next interventions: T414812: Design research support for Article Guidance: Explore how to best provide guidance while editing
Building the new experience:
- Technical exploration/proof-of-concept: T410569: Technical explorations to support Article Guidance
- Workflow: T414409: Article Creation Guidance: Initial intervention workflow
- Entry points:
- Edit tag: T418155: Include an edit tag when Visual Editor publishes contents initiated through the Article Guidance workflow
- Instrument workflow steps: T417046: Instrument the steps on the Article Guidance workflow
- Security review: T418724: Application Security Review request for Article Guidance
- Deploy on test wiki: T417200: Deploy Article Guidance extension to production (testwiki)
Community collaboration:
- Potential pilot wikis: T414448: Define list of potential pilot wikis
- Collaborate with pilot wikis to define guidance to provide for their editors: T417249: Collaborate with pilot wikis to define the initial guidance
- Invite communities to adapt the general guidelines to their specific needs: T422609: Invite pilot communities to review the outlines in the test instance in English
- Localization of the workflow: T421069: Article Guidance: check localization status for target languages
- Check whether Wikidata labels are needed for the pilot wikis selected topics: T416986: Check availability of Wikidata labels in the pilot wikis language for their selected topics for Article Guidance
- Outreach to more communities beyond pilot wikis: T417201: Community outreach beyond the pilot wikis
Experimentation:
- Measurements for key signals: T414503: Impact measurements for Article Guidance
- Analysis of current entry points: T416686: Analyze usage of different entry points for article creation on mobile
- Experiment plan: T414536: Experiment plan for Article Guidance
- Sample size estimations: T422523: Sample Size Power Analysis for Article Guidance first A/B test
- Security Review T418724: Application Security Review request for Article Guidance
- Experiment config and schema registration T422146: Experiment config and schema registration (Article Guidance initial intervention)
- Launch experiment
- Analyze experiment results
Scaling and amplifying impact:
- Standard guidance for common article types: T417254: Prepare outlines with standard guidance for common article types.
Explorations:
- Entry point exploration: T414535: Article Guidance entry point exploration
- Collaboration to explore support guidance while editing: T414605: Article Guidance: Explore how to best provide guidance while editing
- Work in shorter iterations: T422588
- Integration with the registration process: T424488: Explore how to integrate Article Guidance with the registration process
- Integration of community-support spaces: T424494: Explore how to integrate community-support spaces such as the Teahouse in Article Guidance
- Relevant work in the VisualEditor space:
- T426834: Prevent Suggestion Mode overlap during guided article creation
- T426772: Suggestion Mode/Article Guidance/VE possible UX overlap
- T427520: Provide access to add a reference from the Citation Needed template in more languages
- T408427: Present citation needed suggestions in a consistent way
- T422109: Include an edit tag when Visual Editor publishes contents initiated through Article Wizard
- T422822: Allow annotating red links on wikis with a Wikidata item