Context:

Article Guidance surfaces community-defined outlines to editors when they start a new article. When no outline exists for the editor's topic, editors currently hit a dead end at the topic matching step. No outlines also means that the workflow can't offer any guidance at all at the moment.

A default generic guidance in code would mean Article Guidance could have a some generic guidance implicit in the code that would be available upon activation. It's a minimum version of the workflow that offers some guidance that is generic to all wikis until more specific outlines are created.

If no outline exists and the workflow is activated, it would use this default generic outline until a wiki-specific generic outline is created by the community or more topic-specific outlines are created.

The default outline would be implicit, meaning it would live as translatable code strings and they would be translatable strings. They would not be customizable. If a community activates the feature and considers the default generic outline to be too generic, they can create their wiki-specific generic guidance outline. That wiki specific generic guidance outline would trump the default guidance.

This task aims at defining this default generic outline. Including the text contents and all implicit behaviours of the notability system and source validation. The idea is to work on the minmum version that makes this activable and provides a min version of guidance. Once the first version is done, we'll progressively work on improvements.

Default generic outline contents and flow breakdown

• Title search: happens as usual

• Wikidata results are displayed as usual

• Outline matching: All wikidata results selection lead to the workflow using the default generic outline contents

• Unsupported topic: this screen is dropped, as all results lead to the workflow with default generic outline contents

• Subject unavailable? Pick a type instead: right after feature activation, this would lead to no types to choose from, as there are no outlines. Some options here are:
  • Changing "Subject unavailable? Pick a type" to something like " Subject unavailable, continue next step" and next step is sources. But this would have to be conditioned to any other outlines existing or not, when new outlines are created, we bring the manual selection screen back?
  • Still open the manual outline selection page, and add a generic guidance CTA. This would make the experience a bit strange as if there are no outlines it's an extra step for the editor to just continue, but it's the most minimum version that does not change the flow before we make more conscious decisions on this step.
  • Other longer term solution is to offer a list of potential outlines to select from, the selection would not have any effect on the user as they'd still have default generic guidance, but it would make the experience more structured. We said we'd work on this as a second phase and that for the darklaunch we'd keep it minimal, but maybe it makes sense to attempt it now?

• Sources step: wether editor enters the flow via wikidata match or via manual selection, the next step will be sources as usual. In the sources step, we need to define:
  • Copy: This can mirror the current copy on outlines and we can propose general tips for what kind of sources work well across wikipedia
  • Sources lists to check against. This is had to be applicable to all wikis. Any available globally restricted sources lists to connect to the check? In the future, we should connect reference risk model here for a better experience. For now, it could be an encouragement to have sources beforehand.

• Tips from the community: this could be general wikipedia guidelines. TBA.

• Handoff to VE: Article structure that applies to any article will be hard to consolidate. Options:
  • "Start with an introduction of the topic and continue with the most relevant sections."

Scope of the task:

• Define the above contents and flow adjustments
• Implement the changes:
  • content as strings
  • drop UnsupportedSubject step