Wikipedia talk:New pages patrol/New landing page proposal/Article workflow

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Hi Kudpung; thanks for pointing me to this! Glad to see work in this area is continuing. Overall, it looks like a major project. I'd be happy to participate in it, although my capacity is mediumly limited.

One thing I'd encourage us to think about is what in product development-speak might be called the minimum viable product. It's a lot harder to do stuff in giant package proposals than more incremental steps that add up. Which parts of this can be done independently, and which require the full package? Sdkb ^talk 06:10, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

@Sdkb nice to see you are still interested. One part of it is near identical to your User:Sdkb/Vision for a better Article Wizard and we arrived at it entirely independent of each other. It's neither a big nor a complex project, it's just a set of of hyperlinked pages which we all know how to do. I think it's only 'major' in the posiitve impact it will have on the two fronts: 1) Reduction of burden on NPP resulting in it being a more pleasant task, and 2) One specific audience: the new user whose only and first intention is to create an article..

Like all projects, it's description pages make it look bigger than it is because it carries the arguments for needing it and how we g0t here, but it's actually quite simple. It just improves on some elements that we already have. I've done the MVP already, for example that's how I cut down the existing 'Your first article' page from a 40 minute wall of text to 6 minutes reading without loosing any of the information in it. There are no incremental steps. The two parts are :

• the minor tweak to the landing page a new user gets immediately on registering. This gives him/her a binary choice: What do you want to do next, write an article or something else? The choice of writing an article is what concerns us here. The 'something else' has been catered for by the WMF Growth team at vast expense over a period of at least two years with no discernable impact on the quality of new articles. Its objective is to catch new users and mentor them into general editing and retain their ongoing interest in being editors. It's a good concept but it doesn't reach out to as many new users as the ones who create the a great many of the 100s of new article we process each day at NPP we receive every day.
• a new article wizard, a sequence of simple, interactive pages like many of the tutorials we already have, culminating in a choice of thematic article pages to fill in and create as a draft article. These model pages exist as leftovers from a previous project. All they need is some tooltips added which are removed by a script when the page is converted to a draft article.

So although this is a two part project it's not a 'package' per se; it will only fulfill its mission if it is presented as one process. Perhaps you didn't read the other page of this project at Wikipedia:New pages patrol/New landing page proposal. The two pages need to be taken together. Perhaps I will merge them but I've built the project on the lines of the way the WMF do theirs which have a main page and sub pages. Look at it like the structure of the pages in an Arbcom case.

What I would like to do is get a few of us round a table like we did when we first began this project believing we would need get Growth interested in it, but when I realised that it does not need the intervention of anyone who has access to MediaWiki and that we have the empirical knowledge and skill sets to do it ourselves, that's what I propose. For a simple example on Wikipedia in of one recent piece of teamwork, I proposed the new Move to Draft feature which replaced the previous iteration, did the graphics and the content, and another user wrote the script. The actual team was 4 people. I believe in teamwork and that's why I don't want to spend more time putting the final touches of it together unless we have a mini consensus that it's worthwhile. To anyone like yourself who has written a bot, what is needed here is an excruciatingly easy few line of js to create some tooltips and a script to remove them, all the other button functions exist already and from my work setting up a non Wikipedia related Wiki, it's no more complicated that setting up a new noticeboard - something I've done often enough here, but this project is more than a bot, it will have a positive impact for its audiences. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 19:29, 6 March 2025 (UTC)

Thank you @Kudpung, for the new article creation proposal that is tied to improving New Page Patrollers' work . Your approach in this proposal for addressing the challenges faced by newcomers who want to create articles and patrollers is something to think about. I am Runa, and I lead teams in WMF Product and Technology that currently work on Language and Content Growth initiatives. I was pointed to this thread by a colleague.

At this stage, we are working to understand the needs and constraints of various communities and their editorial practices, particularly how it can connect to their prioritization of content vital to their languages. Your proposal provides an angle that can help determine some short-term next steps as we continue unraveling editorial practices and needs in our movement.

Thank you for the work you and others have put into formulating this proposal. We do hope to have wider discussions on this developing topic some time in the future. Runa Bhattacharjee (WMF) (talk) 13:03, 14 April 2025 (UTC)

Kudpung invited me to help. I think that this is a bigger project than most realize and I sort of ration out my available Wiki-minutes....I don't see myself as a major contributor but I'd be happy and flattered to help and put in my thoughts if they might be helpful anywhere. Sincerely, North8000 (talk) 16:32, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Hi North8000, Thank's for chiming in. I think that by trying to explain the project in writing I've again made it sound far more "huge and broad" than it is. It doesn't actually handle a range of scenarios and doesn't affect the work of reviewers and what they need to know to do it. It touches lightly on PAGs but doesn't alter any of them or call for interactions with them other than the most basic rules of page creation which cause so much awkward blowback at reviewers who are only doing their job; so it doesn't touch on the 'big fuzzy ecosystem of wp:notability'. It's neither a tutorial for page creation nor for understanding the huge mass of SNGs. It's just an interactive road map, like "So, you want to create an article? Fine, take the main road, come to the crossroads (select your template), read the signs and follow the route (article format), picking up some packages (sources) on the way, and when you have them all, press either 'Publish' to deliver them or 'Save to draft' for someone to check the contents of the packages for the right items or damaged goods."
After that, the familiar tasks of NPP and/or AfC reviewers take the relay.

There is conjecture that such a system would force editors to use the Article Wizard. That is absolutely not the case as can be seen from the flowchart. The Wiki meme 'Anyone can edit' is not in danger. What I didn't realise until a couple of days ago is that Sdkb has first hand experience in putting tutorials together and what I am proposing is a scenario which not unlike the architecture of Help:Introduction (which is aimed at a different audience), is a series of four or five linked pages, but with the main help embedded in the thematic article template the creator chooses. There are absolutely no complex graphics and it isn't a comic carton, but in a way it exploits the psychology of following instructions in linked pages, a bit like MYST, an early, cosy first-person game (for those of us who remember it) but without the puzzles to solve. Our challenge is to find the right words and approach that will work for all new users by providing the right level of help without sounding patronising to the academic, or confusing to the younger user. It avoids making wrong moves that make you start over or get you blocked or banned.

We originally proposed this project long before I was aware of Sdkb's work both on their proposals for a genuine Article Wizard and the interactive help system, so the pure coincidence of our arriving at very similar solutions demonstrates that it is a project that can be offered to the community which then through RfC can accept it or reject it, while pointing out here that no RfC was held or needed for the development of Help:Introduction or the original Article Wizard that was in operation until it was replaced by a simple flip book of instructions. The grunt work is mostly done. It just needs fine tuning. I will soon be adding a description of the steps in the flowchart and I will ping you again for your thoughts. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 20:13, 16 March 2025 (UTC)

Cool. You know this project far far better than I do. Sincerely,North8000 (talk) 18:27, 17 March 2025 (UTC)

One note which also gets to why I thought this might be a bigger job. I would think that a big and important fork in the flow chart, guidance point and possible big help to NPP is deciding "should an article on this topic exist?" which is mostly based on wp:not and wp:notability. If y'all did want to include this I'd be happy to try to get practical guidance into a couple paragraphs. North8000 (talk) 15:21, 18 March 2025 (UTC)

@North8000 while this project has no effect on how NPPers work (i.e. it does not touch on their interpretations of PAGs and their decisions what to do with new articles) and does not attempt to change the wp:not and wp:notability guidelines, the purpose of involving experienced reviewers in workshopping this simple idea is the fact that it would dramatically reduce their workload. The reviewers are the only people who understand how essential that is. This is where even if they had the time and budget, the WMF teams are not pre-loaded with that knowledge. More importantly, from the point of view of technology this project needs no intervention from the WMF. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 07:41, 19 March 2025 (UTC)