Please share your thoughts or ask any questions you may have about the Article guidance initiative. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 28 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

@UOzurumba (WMF), Would you guys want ideas on what to fix? I'm a bit unsure on what to provide feedback on? Sohom Datta (talk) 18:12, 2 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hello @Sohom Datta,
As this initiative is in its early stages, we are interested in the following:
  1. Exchanging ideas on the approaches we can consider, as well as those we should avoid, to address the problems mentioned on the project page.
  2. Discussing the types of articles where guidance would be beneficial.
  3. Suggesting Wikipedia communities we can collaborate with to create an initial set of outlines for the selected types of articles.
These are the primary areas where we are seeking feedback. However, please feel free to share any additional thoughts or feedback that you or any other members of PTAC think that could be helpful. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 3 December 2025 (UTC)Reply
Hello @UOzurumba (WMF),
    • A part that is missing in my opinion is the ability to chose whether to create the page directly or to create it as a draft (draft in the User namespace or in the Draft namespace depending on the wiki).
    • Although this project targets new editors, the system that is being built would also be useful to experienced editors as there is currently no easy way to use a boilerplate when creating an article. Currently, I think most people either start from scratch or copy/paste content from another article on a similar topic. There is also no proper way to start article creation: either we search for the name and click on the red name or we manually type the name of the article that we want to create in the url bar of the navigator. Having an esay way to find boilerplates would be appreciated. But this would require a more precise selection of topic, with selection of community-defined sub-categories, like "writer" or "athlete" as subcategories of "people" and subsubcategories like "rugby player" or "football player" as subcategories of "athlete". For experienced editors, the parts about url collection and notability warning could be skipped.
  2. I don't think there is one type of articles in particular where guidance would be beneficial. All types would benefit from it, although from my personal experience most deleted articles are about people not meeting notability criteria.
Escargot bleu (talk) 12:18, 24 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@UOzurumba (WMF)We made a good start at Talk:Growth/Article_creation_for_new_editors/Flow but the Growth Team appears to be looking at more complex solutions including MediaWiki extensions that will be at least another two years in development. These would then followed by trials and testing while other very simple solutions made by community volunteers with professional experience in UI and UX would address these very goals extremely quickly without the time and and expense. @KStoller-WMF we began a constructive dialogue but various ideas seem to be spread around on overlapping projects in different departments. Kudpung (talk) 23:00, 25 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you for sharing the conversations with Growth team. We’re pursuing faster development and testing cycles for this project. Our timeline favours a shorter path from development to testing, though it may shift slightly as the work progresses with community input. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 27 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@UOzurumba (WMF), I do hope that community input will be taken seriously. The volunteers have grown wary of WMF solutions that have not received much, if any community input and have already proven to be either largely ineffective or having little real impact on areas that need critical - but not lengthy - investigation. I am looking forward to today's virtual meeting. Kudpung (talk) 19:10, 27 February 2026 (UTC)Reply
@UOzurumba (WMF), thanks again for the meeting. I was there but I dd not speak (I was the old man: Kudpung, showing as SPT Pools) . Would it be possible to provide the names of the attendees visible in the video , and to update the list of team members? Some are not registered on any Foundation projects so nothing is known about them or what they do, and some may have left the WMF already.
Kudpung (talk) 14:47, 1 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, @Kudpung, for attending the meeting. Apologies for the late reply. The names of the attendees are in the meeting document. I have also updated the list of team members on the project page. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@UOzurumba (WMF), Thank you for replying. I have an upcoming meeting with the WMF to discuss the develoment of a very similar project thyat has been in development for a couple of years already. I do appreciate that this excellent initiative addresses regional Wikipedias but as there is significant overlap, it may help later to pool ideas and avoid duplication of effort.
On another note, perhaps project documents could be best shared on Foundation project pages and not on Google just because Google's free solutions exist. I have reproduced the contents of that document here to simplify the access for other participants:
Attendees:
Agenda:
Introduction - 5 mins
The meeting started with introductions Office Hour (1): Article guidance
Introduce yourself in the chat
Username?
The wiki you edit
Wikimedia friendly space policy applies here, we will be civil in our conversations.
Presentation - 35 mins
Write your question in the chat during the presentation and we will attend to it during the Q&A
Q&A - 15 mins
Next step - 4 mins
Continue working, in cooperating your feedback
Close - 1 mins
Notes
The meeting started with introductions, and the WMF staff presented their plan, approach and expectations from communities during the project. After the presentation, attendees were invited to ask questions.
Someone from the Portuguese Wiki provided feedback that everything is understood and that they look forward to having this feature soon.
Attendees were encouraged to complete the questionnaire to help the WMF team understand the type of guidance to provide for the feature. To further stress its significance, WMF staff emphasised the importance of this feedback.
As the project progresses, we will schedule another meeting to share our progress and gather feedback to help us iterate. In the meantime, we will communicate and share status updates through the Article guidance project page.
Action items
Kudpung (talk) 01:11, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you @Kudpung. I created this page for our conversations. So, I have documented it there. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 10 March 2026 (UTC)Reply

Although the (technical) editing process has changed dramatically since 2008, the underlying issues/problems/approaches to writing a new article have not. So I think you'll find this to be useful, at least for identifying lots of things that editors need advice about when creating a new article.

Also, in Wikipedia:Editor's Index to Wikipedia, the section on new articles has links to guidance, essays, etc., here.

Finally, I think that creating a new section and creating a new article are significantly different, since the notability issue is (presumably) not relevant when adding just a section to an existing article. On the editing scale, adding a new section is closer to adding a new paragraph than it is to adding a new article, or even, the next level down, to reorganizing and expanding an article.

John Broughton (talk) 00:28, 3 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you @John Broughton, for your helpful feedback and for directing us to those resources. I appreciate you highlighting the Wikipedia Manual for writing better articles and the Editor's Index on new articles. We will review these as we move forward.
You made a valid point about the distinction between creating a new section and a new article. A new section may still require the addition of verifiable sources and other considerations, which also makes it challenging for new editors.
Thanks again for your interest and for taking the time to share your valuable thoughts as a very experienced Wikipedian. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 3 December 2025 (UTC)Reply

When a corresponding article is already available in another language and the user has access to the content translation feature, the system could recommend translating the existing article rather than creating a new one from scratch. Escargot bleu (talk) 11:35, 24 February 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the suggestion, @Escargot bleu.
Currently Content Translation already has among its entry points an invite to translate an article when users create a new article on Visual Editor. This option is shown only when there is a certain degree of certainty about the multilingual experience of the user and the identification of the topic the user is trying to create. There are more details about this feature in the corresponding Phabricator tickets (mobile, and desktop).
The new process of Article Guidance will help to better identify the exact topic in some cases, so there is an opportunity to make this feature more reliable. In any case, the initial goal of the experiment is to learn whether the new guided experience is more effective than the default non-guided one. Based on the results, we can consider for the particular case of multilingual users how to connect the two guided experiences (Article Guidance and Content Translation) when both are possible.
Thanks for your interest in the project, and don't hesitate to share any other thoughts. Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:43, 4 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Support for surfacing the other language article(s) and mentioning or recommending translation. However, oppose the translation tool as it's not really useful in practice and just makes translation more complicated mainly but not only due to (starting from a) machine translation not being possible with it. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:18, 9 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective, I don't get what you mean. Translation tool precisely makes you start from a machine translation (Google Translate). Escargot bleu (talk) 23:11, 9 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
It depends on the language pair then, this is not possible for many language pairs. The other main issue with the CT tool is what it does to templates, specifically ref templates. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Precisely, and since Google Translate is now using AI, the quality has dropped to very often being unusable. One of the problems with inviting users to translate articles is that the users are very often not bilingual and are therefore not able to proofread the machine translation for it accuracy. This wastes the time of the patrollers who are not linguists either and such articles are generally moved to draft ifr they are not ready for mainspace. Kudpung (talk) 07:47, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Is GT using gen AI by default now? I think it's just neural machine translation and it usually works very well (for text content) except for where there is the max character break and with a few issues here and there that one needs to fix when proofreading. Why would they add sth that reduces quality; it's more likely that more users are trying to undermine the process/functionality and/or the project via low-quality translations.
"One of the problems with inviting users to translate articles is that the users are very often not bilingual" good point, key here – Escargot bleu which languages the user speaks needs to be considered. Maybe only suggest translation if the user specified to speak a language that an existing article is available in or has say 50+ edits in that language's version (inferred secondary language). However, it seems like Escargot bleu's suggestion is flawed from the start anyway: how would the article guidance system know if/which articles already exist if the user did not start from another existing article to begin with? Prototyperspective (talk) 18:35, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
I was referring to the title matching step (T414902), where a wikidata item is searched. The system is already able to find articles in other languages, since communities have the option to restrict article creation to only articles which already exist in five other languages (T415485). Escargot bleu (talk) 19:32, 20 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
@Prototyperspective, Google Translate used to be quite good. As a native level user of some languages I used to let GT do the typing for me, leaving me just to proofread and correct the errors that only a native speaker would recognise. Nowadays, with its use of predictive translation, not only does it often get the tone and semantics wrong, but it occasionally introduces phraseology and lexis that are related in context but which are inappropriate for the target language. Kudpung (talk) 01:01, 27 March 2026 (UTC)Reply

The invitation to fill out a form needs to warn people that the form is hosted outside Wikipedia and state that it is hosted by Google — GhostInTheMachine talk 11:57, 19 March 2026 (UTC)Reply

The invitation is no longer there. Nikerabbit (talk) 10:08, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Maybe, but ... as a principle, any invitation to fill out a form needs to warn people if the form is hosted outside Wikipedia (MediaWiki) ... — GhostInTheMachine talk 14:09, 31 March 2026 (UTC)Reply
Yes, that is correct. Apologies for missing this. Nikerabbit (talk) 07:02, 1 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Was testing out the feature to write about the women's health research funding gap, and could not find a matching type (such as social issue). The descriptions of the existing types are quite complicated. Femke (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

IMO there is a danger in attempting to address too many article types. Firstly there is the developmental timeframe and cost benefit vs results. Secondly there is the information overload in confronting the the new users with a difficult choice from too many example pages where a maximum of around 10 basic article types would suffice, and then piling on all over again with more TL;DR 'helpful notes and instructions – which is a characteristic of the en.Wiki.
A short study of the New Pages Feed would quickly determine what the the most common article types are nowadays (in fact this has been done empirically already). E.g. bios already appear to represent >50% of new creations. Like you, I'm passionate about making Wikipedia easier to understand, but also easier to create and edit appropriate new articles in the goal of achieving some consistent and sustainable quality at their entry point.
I think that's what this project is all about - it builds on a proposal we offered the WMF already back in 2022. It's nice to see it gaining some traction but a lot more input from the informed community stakeholders like would be great and I think that is coming. The @John Broughton 2008 Missing Manual contained a Wizard that was already far more interactive and intuitive than the 6 static page flipthrough that quietly replaced it a couple of years ago. Kudpung (talk) 16:43, 7 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thank you, @Femke, for testing the feature and sharing your valuable feedback.
I appreciate you pointing out that there is no outline for social issues articles. We have included an initial version of the outline for Social issue, feel free to review it, try using it to create a new article, and edit the outline further for it to capture the most useful guidance. Outlines are regular wiki pages (with just some extra markup), feel free to create new outlines using the existing ones as a guide. The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create.
You mentioned the descriptions of existing types seem complicated. If you have suggestions or examples to simplify or clarify them, we would appreciate your input. Our goal is to make this as accessible as possible, so your ideas are welcome.
Thank you again, for your time and for helping us improve this for everyone. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 8 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Hello,

I tried using the patch demo form as though I wanted to create an article about No Game No Life (television series). After typing No game no, the interface correctly suggested the matching Wikidata item No Game No Life. However, when I clicked on that suggestion, instead of automatically inserting the Wikidata item's title, the form proceeded as if I were creating a new article titled No game no.

It seems that selecting the suggested item does not populate the title field with the corresponding Wikidata label and instead continues with the partially typed query. Escargot bleu (talk) 20:49, 8 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the feedback @Escargot bleu.
As part of the process to capture the user intent, the workflow starts by capturing both the title for the article and the subject it is about using Wikidata. In the example you provided, it makes perfect sense to get the title autocompleted based on the Wikidata selection.
We'll look into more detail to identify whether doing so automatically can cause some unintended surprises for other cases. For example, a user typing "Orange (color)" as the title of their article and selecting the orange Wikidata item (Q39338), may find it also confusing for their title to be changed back to just "orange" automatically.
I created a ticket to explore possible solutions that help with the case reported while not introducing issues for other cases. Feel free to subscribe to the ticket to get updates or share further thoughts. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:27, 9 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

I attempted to create the Bangladesh article.

However, when using sources in another language (in this case, Bangla), I receive the error: “Source check failed. Please try again.” Is this intended behavior?

Additionally, all references in the main article are showing citation errors. I expected the references to be processed through an automatic citation system, similar to how they appear in Wikipedia, so that they would follow the citation format in the article. I was also unable to add additional citations later. I also have encountered #Issue with title input.

Another concern is that the pre-filled article contains “[Country name]” repeated multiple times. Is there a way to define this once so that all instances are automatically replaced, or to have it pre-filled based on the article title? Tausheef Hassan (talk) 07:33, 9 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for your feedback, @Tausheef Hassan.
I was able to reproduce the issue with non-ascii URLs, and I reported it in this ticket for the team to fix it.
Regarding the citation errors in the article (those at the bottom of the published article) they show because the references provided in the initial steps of the workflow are added to the references section automatically, but they are not used in the article. The option to "add citation" should list them in the "Reuse" tab. Maybe the previous error was also getting in the way, but let us know if this is not working as expected.
On your last point, the support for initial contents is very basic for this first iteration. We are exploring more ideas on how to provide guidance while users edit. Surfacing auto-complete suggestions based on available information (from the title, wikidata item, or what the user wrote before) seems like a very good idea. I've added a reference to your comment in the ticket.
Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:45, 9 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

I made an extremely barebones version of At Hope's Ravine, with some intentional mistakes such as not adding a citation in some places and not following the usual MoS.

I don't think adding {{Citation needed }} at the end of every sentence or paragraph will be all that useful. There's already a massive backlog of uses of that template for people to go through, and the way it's added after every template sentence is excessive and close to tag bombing. I also don't think a new editor would know how to use the citations that were generated in the "show your sources before writing" step, and would assume that because the sources are shown at the bottom that they don't need to add anything inline. I'm not sure what the solutions to these problems are, though - maybe a pop-up of some sort?

Also, I realise this is probably because it's a test wiki, but I couldn't switch to the source editor, which was a bit annoying. As well as this, the Cite pop-up stopped responding for me after trying to enter this link in the Automatic tab, and clicking "Website" in the Manual tab froze the entire browser tab; at least one of these freezes has caused empty references in the text. Suntooooth, it/he (talk | contribs) 15:39, 13 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Side note, a bug that might be unrelated to this test but that I noticed just now when looking at the page I made: I ended my edit summary with ), and in the history it didn't add another closing bracket to match the one automatically added at the start of edit summaries, so the edit summary reads (Create barebones page (based on en:At Hope's Ravine). Suntooooth, it/he (talk | contribs) 21:47, 13 April 2026 (UTC)Reply
Thanks for the feedback, @Suntooooth.
The focus of the initial intervention is mostly on the workflow the user experiences before getting to the Visual Editor. In this intervention, the initial contents are presented in Visual Editor all at once, without the need for additional custom user interfaces. In this way, we can learn quickly while exploring other ideas for upcoming interventions. Recently we have been exploring ideas on how to provide guidance while editing that may expand some of the capabilities in the future.
Currently, the "citation needed" templates are used as an already-available solution to convey the expectation of a reference to be added and work as a quick access to add those. The outlines that define guidance message and ocntents (including the use of "citation needed" templates) can be edited as wiki pages. We provided an initial set of outlines as examples in the test instance for general review, but as those get transferred to the pilot wikis each community can refine those further. If there is any general change that may apply globally, feel free to edit the example outlines.
On your later points, the test instance is very basic and may be missing some of the common functionality from production wikis such as Wikipedia. Once we complete the deployment process, it should be possible to test the feature on a more realistic environment.
Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:47, 14 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Building -- Althair (talk) 15:12, 19 April 2026 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the input, @Althair.
The current set of outlines in the test instance were defined as an initial set of examples. Outlines are created as regular wiki pages. If you are interesting on trying the process of outline creation, feel free to start a new outline for "Building". In this case, the article tye will be "Q41176" which corresponds to the concept of "Building" in Wikidata.
The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create. We are interested in hearing about feedback for the process of creating the outlines too. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:46, 20 April 2026 (UTC)Reply