Guided tours

Guided tours is a project designed to provide infrastructure for guided tours. It started at WMF Tech Days 2012, and is now under the purview of editor engagement experiments.

Rationale
Currently in MediaWiki, our communities are limited to using static wiki pages, templates, and other functions build tutorials and tours of any kind. As rich as tools like Wikipedia:Tutorial might be, they interrupt the user and force them to go to a separate Web page. They are also quite long; most documentation about Wikipedia would take quite some time to read in full. Guided tours are listed in our feature map as a potential as a tool for new editor support.

User experience
Interactive guided tours provide a simple, step-by-step guide through a feature set without interrupting the user. Guided tours don't dominate the screen, are dismissable, and walk the user through a task directly. Guided tours are also ideally something that one can return to at any time when you need it.

Tours included by default
The following tours are currently packaged with the extension, and are thus available on any wiki where GuidedTour is installed.


 * test - Simple tour to show what tours can do.
 * gettingstarted - Tour to help the user make their first edit. The primary test case will be for Extension:GettingStarted, but is very close to being a general "make your first edit" tour. This tour is a product of the requirements for our onboarding new Wikipedians project.

Tour ideas
Potential tours include nearly all tasks currently covered by help documentation in Wikimedia projects. We're starting with Wikipedia, and with tasks that are most common or attractive to new registered editors, since they are a group most likely to need a guided tour of an interface or activity.


 * The edit window aka 'make your first edit'
 * Page creation
 * 'My user page'
 * Task-specific, such as for the backlogs of copyediting, adding links, and other activities. (We'll start with Onboarding new Wikipedians.)

Please add to the list!

Technical documentation
We're building guided tours with the Guiders.js library (github, Local Guiders branch). Guiders is under an Apache 2.0 license and has been used by WordPress, Drupal, and others. We have currently adapted the Guiders library in to an Extension:GuidedTour, which also can feed changes upstream.

A guided tour would be launched by adding a "tour=tourname" to the URL in a link. This will cause the Guided tour to load both the code to display the tour and the tour itself. The tour can be defined by an extension, or be in the MediaWiki namespace (MediaWiki:Guidedtour-tour-thetourname.js). Individual wikis can override the CSS at MediaWiki:Guidedtour-custom.css.

If you'd like to help out or follow progress, you can check Trello or Bugzilla.

Status
(Regular status updates)