Context:

KR: DE1.4: Guided Article Creation
Hypothesis: DE1.4.2 Scalable guidance model

The Article Guidance feature aims at helping junior editors succeed at creating Wikipedia articles that align with community policies and survive community review. The feature surfaces community-defined guidance, source recommendations, and article template to the editor.

During the ongoing Q4 FY25-26 experiment, Article Guidance showed a statistically significant +17.2% relative improvement in 30-day article survival rate across pilot wikis. But a key bottleneck identified was outline creation and maintenance: building outlines required significant LPL team involvement and high community engagement, limiting how quickly the feature could be deployed to new wikis, the topic coverage that the feature could help with, and how easily communities can maintain them over time.

This epic covers the tooling work within hypothesis DE1.4.2 (Scalable guidance model) to reduce that dependency, giving communities better tools to create, manage, and improve outlines faster and more independently.

Goals:

• Communities will be able to create and maintain outlines for their wiki without requiring WMF team involvement.
• Communities will be able to onboard and activate Article Guidance faster, with outline tooling reducing the upfront effort required.
• The LPL team will spend less time on outline creation and maintenance, freeing capacity for higher-value work.

Combining this work with community Community configuration, Data visibility, as well as community communications, we'll be able to enable Article Guidance to wikis, leaving the configuration aspects on their side.

Outcome of this work:

Plan (WIP):

Outline management, Special:ArticleGuidanceOutlines

• Build Special:ArticleGuidanceOutlines: a special page that shows pre-selected Wikidata items proposed for outline creation, outline coverage data per article type, and the ability to create, edit, and delete outlines: {TXXX}
• Define the initial set of Wikidata items to propose across all wikis - request data analysis to identify the most commonly deleted article categories as the basis for this selection: {TXXX}
• Revise outline rendering and format to identify improvements for better editing experience (+ implementation of these changes) {TXXX}

Outline builder, backend capabilities

• Build a system to analyse existing articles of a given type on the local wiki and extract common section patterns: {TXXX}
• Build a system to extract reference domains commonly used in articles of a given type, as a starting point for recommended and discouraged sources: {TXXX}

Outline builder, generation

• Build the outline generation trigger: an experienced or admin editor selects a Wikidata item from Special:ArticleGuidanceOutlines and triggers outline generation. The system runs behind the scenes and lands the editor on the generated outline page for review and editing: {TXXX}
• The generator produces article structure and referenciable information only (common article sections, common references, patterns). Guidance text ("quick considerations", tips) is explicitly out of scope for generation and remains human-authored: {TXXX}
• Define how to surface transparency information on the data used to generate the outline (e.g. "this outline was generated based on X articles of this type"). Presentation approach TBD, but transparency is a requirement: {TXXX}

Out of scope:

• On-the-fly outline generation during article creation (when a user selects an article type with no existing outline). This is deliberately deferred to a future phase outside this hypothesis.
• LLM-based generation of guidance text or quick considerations. The generator is deterministic, based on existing article data only.

Sequencing:

This work can begin in Q1 FY26-27 alongside DE1.4.1 (Pre-VE guidance iteration). It does not need to wait for final experiment results. It is a prerequisite for DE1.4.3 (Multi-wiki rollout): communities should be able to create and manage outlines independently before Article Guidance is deployed at broader scale. Combined with DE1.4.2 community configuration and data visibility work, this enables wikis to activate and maintain Article Guidance without WMF intervention.

• DE1.4.1: Pre-VE guidance iteration
• DE1.4.3: Multi-wiki rollout (dependent on this work)