Page MenuHomePhabricator

Provide an option for experienced editors to skip the guidance in Article Guidance
Open, HighPublic

Description

Article guidance (T396029) introduces a workflow for article creation where community-editable outlines are used to provide guidance, restrictions, and initial content to start specific types of articles. This is organized as an experiment to learn whether junior editors, especially on mobile, benefit from the guidance to make their new articles more likely to survive (reducing the workload for those reviewing them).

While the guidance captures useful practices by the community, those may not provide as much value in some particular cases, and there is no current way to skip it. Based on the input from editors two cases were shared:

  • Advanced editor with high expertise in the creation of articles may find the guidance not providing extra value.
  • Editor trying to create a redirect may not find a convenient way to do so.

This ticket proposes to provide an option to create the article without guidance that can be offered to experienced users (not exposed to junior editors). This will be available once the user provides a title for the article and will lead the user to the default experience of the wiki for article creation. In this way, users needing the guidance can benefit from it while there is an option to accomodate situations where it is not the case.

Proposed flow
  • If user lands in Article Guidance from a red link and continues through the normal guided article-creation flow by default.
Muvim New Article (1).png (1,080×1,920 px, 226 KB)
  • If the user is an experienced editor, show a secondary bypass action at the bottom so they can open a blank article page for the entered title without using Article Guidance.
Editor bypass action
  • Show below “Subject unavailable? Pick a type instead”.
  • Keep it at the bottom of the flow so it does not compete with suggested subjects or the “Pick a type instead” fallback.
  • Only show for experienced editors.
  • Copy: “Skip guidance. Start with a blank page”
  • “Start with a blank page” opens the normal editor for the entered title and bypasses Article Guidance.
  • Treat as a subtle separated strip, not as another primary choice.
  • Use Codex cdxIconInfo. This icon is decorative/supporting only for now.
  • Use Codex styling/tokens:
    • @background-color-neutral-subtle for the strip background.
    • @border-color-subtle for the top/bottom separator.
    • quiet progressive Codex button/link treatment for “Start with a blank page”.
    • Use Codex @font-size-small for text size, equivalent to 14px.
Desktop treatment
Screenshot 2026-05-27 at 3.34.44 PM.png (3,018×1,964 px, 561 KB)

On desktop the skip option moves into the existing footer row alongside "Pick a type instead", with the same copy and gate.

  • Placement: right-aligned in the existing "None of these? Pick a type instead" footer row; cdxIconInfo to the left of the label; no background, no separator borders; @font-size-small.

Event Timeline

SGautam_WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)
SGautam_WMF added a subscriber: SBisson.

Change #1295097 had a related patch set uploaded (by Sbisson; author: Sbisson):

[mediawiki/extensions/ArticleGuidance@master] Option to skip the workflow for experienced editors

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1295097

@SGautam_WMF There is a non-zero chance that the current search query matches an existing article. Unlikely if they follow a red link but possible if they modify the search query. In that case the edit link would work just the same but the label "Start with a blank page" doesn't make sense. We could change it based on the article existence or have a single label that works in all cases. For instance, the first part: "Skip guidance" (or "Continue without guidance") could be the link, it's already a verb so maybe it can work.

@SGautam_WMF There is a non-zero chance that the current search query matches an existing article. Unlikely if they follow a red link but possible if they modify the search query. In that case the edit link would work just the same but the label "Start with a blank page" doesn't make sense. We could change it based on the article existence or have a single label that works in all cases. For instance, the first part: "Skip guidance" (or "Continue without guidance") could be the link, it's already a verb so maybe it can work.

I think the simple solution would be to try a label that work well in both cases. One of the key goals is to avoid potential confusion about "skip" meaning to jump ahead of the process, which is not the case. That is, this is not skipping steps to get to the editor with initial contents. When skipping, there are no added contents to assist you, which the "blank page" mention helped to reinforce.

With the above in mind, we can consider something along the lines of:

Skip assistance. Edit without community guidance.

For further context, we could make the info icon to open in a new window/tab the project page. In this way users can find it easier where to learn about what we are referring to and participate by providing feedback.

Change #1295097 merged by jenkins-bot:

[mediawiki/extensions/ArticleGuidance@master] Option to skip the workflow for experienced editors

https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/1295097

Will be deployed with the train this week

I tried it on my local setup and it seems to be working