Guided tours

Guided tours is a hackathon project being started at WMF Tech Days 2012. Guided tours are listed in our feature map as a potential as a tool for new editor support.

Current
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.

Future
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.

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 (see also: open tasks from the EN Community Portal).

Please add to the list!

Technical documentation
We're building guided tours with the Guiders.js library (github). Guiders is under an Apache 2.0 license and has been used by WordPress, Drupal, and others. We're currently thinking of implementing guiders as gadgets (e.g.  and  ), probably enabled by default for logged in users.

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 + the specific walkthrough defined by tourname.js which will be located in a restricted namespace.

Development
TODO