As part of Article Guidance (T396029), the initial step of "Title entry and topic matching " requires performing complex Wikidata queries. In some cases, they result in the following error message being shown, which leaves the user to a dead end:
This ticket proposes to:
- Consider approaches for the error not to happen. For example, automatically retry the first time to make sure it is not just a temporary glitch.
- Provide a more user-friendly message: users may not know (or need to know) what Wikidta is.
- Provide an explicit option to retry. To avoid the need to delete and add the last character as a workaround.
UX points
- Avoid showing technical errors to users. e.g. "SPARQL query failed", "Failed to fetch", etc.
- Retry once automatically before showing any error state.
- Allow users to continue to article creation when even retry action fails. The existing "None of these, pick a type instead" affordance in the results list already provides this escape hatch on every search, so the hard-failure state does not need to duplicate it.
Behavior
State 0 - Silent retry
On any failure of any query, retry the failed call once after a short delay. If the retry succeeds, render results normally, no error is shown to the user. Applies to all failure type(search, title existence check, follow-up wikidata queries).
State A - Hard failure
Shown only if the silent retry also fails. Renders inline where the results would be:
- Message: "Couldn't check this subject."
- Text color: color-subtle
- Font size: font-size-medium (body default)
- Font weight: font-weight-normal
- Try again action (inline, next to the message)
- Codex CdxButton with weight="quiet" + action="progressive"
- Text color: color-progressive
- Font weight: font-weight-normal (demoted — not bold)
- Zero padding, baseline-aligned with the message
- Spacing between message and action: spacing-25 (4px)
- Layout
- Inline error block margin-bottom: spacing-50 (8px)
- Footer margin-top: spacing-150 (24px)
State B - Repeated failure
If "Try again" also fails, stay in State A.