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 handle this error in the same way as a similar error was supported in T422841: Improve error handling for "Title entry and topic matching " step in Article Guidance. The proposed approach is the same as in the mentioned ticket (internal logging can identify the specific type of error in each case):

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.