Talk:Article Creation Workflow/Design

Instructional text
This page looks good :-) You're absolutely right, of course, that we offer far too much instructional text. Users who are task-focused perceive the text as an impediment -- e.g., just this past weekend, I tried to test out using the Article Creation Wizard, and even though its text is relatively tight, I still found myself skipping past most of it. The trouble with our existing instructional text is that we try to accommodate all possible use cases [1], which makes the text really, really long. That backfires because users then skip all of it (like I did with the ACW). It'd be much more effective for us to keep instructional text super-succinct --covering just the most common use cases--, because that way, at least some people would get some information that could help them, rather than nobody getting any. Sue Gardner 01:59, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

[1] a laudable goal in software development, but maybe less of a laudable goal for instructional text :-)

MoodBar comments
Does anyone reading the MoodBar comments think that the articles created by these individuals would be kept on Wikipedia? I understand and appreciate the desire to make article creation less horrible, but it comes with a cost. Who's going to pay? --MZMcBride 04:11, 14 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Thanks for reading through the page and for the comments MZ. In my view, the two changes proposed here are:


 * 1) Adding clear instructional material and warnings through one or two interstitial pages that appear before the edit window when you're hitting a redlink
 * 2) Possibly providing a noindexed space outside the main namespace to create articles and strongly encouraging people to work there first
 * Neither of those changes seem like they will make anyone "pay". Rather, we'd like to tell newbies much more clearly upfront what the expectations are, and then ask them to start articles in a place other than the mainspace where both the article and their skills have time to develop. Even without the second step, what we want to do is reduce the costs placed on the community by making it clearer what we do and do not want in Wikipedia. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   06:50, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Number two seems uncannily similar to AfC. Killiondude 07:38, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * Hey Killion. You're right, it is pretty similar, but if you get a chance to read through "Future Phases" section there's more detail there about the ways it's different (as currently proposed anyway). For starters, it would not necessarily require review in order to publish, because it's aimed at registered users rather than anonymous ones. If you want to pick apart that description and leave us some feedback, it'd be a big help. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   17:12, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The only difference between the proposed workspace idea and AfC is that no review is required (or even encouraged, by the looks of it) by an experienced editor. This means that, while your warnings might occasionally convince a new editor to start their articles in the workspace, there is nothing stopping them from immediately moving it from the workspace to mainspace when they realize their article is not yet "live".  Therefore, we're just adding a superfluous step in the article creation process which won't stop anyone from creating an inappropriate article in mainspace, and won't provide for any type of review process by an editor who is familiar with WP policies.  A better process would be to require new users to go through AfC (or a similar AfC-like process) when they want to create a new article, until they have been properly educated on what is expected in a new article.  Thus, en:WP:ACTRIAL.  Snottywong 18:17, 14 September 2011 (UTC)
 * I think I might let Brandon reply about the particulars of the workspace design and how it might be adapted, but I do want to make a general point: when it comes to this or other WMF Projects, nothing has to be taken 100% as-is with an all-or-nothing decision. It's not substantially happening yet, but we'd like to live in a world where there is a lot more of this exact thing going on: experienced editors showing up very very early in the design process and giving us specific feedback about the potential process and policy implications of new features. Steven Walling (WMF) &bull; talk   18:32, 14 September 2011 (UTC)

Lovely Root System - can we make it grow?
This idea has such a lot of useful ways in which it could grow. I'd personally like it if new accounts had a sandbox area automatically created for them, with links to a really good set of interactive tutorials covering the basics of what newbies need to know; screenshots with annotations for "how to do this", which newbies can read in conjunction with playing in their sandbox; a kind of "test yourself" auto-marked interactive quiz thing for each basic concept, a heap of stuff like that so that newbies can really get into practising "getting it right" from a very early stage. A links to "pick a mentor" (somewhere really easy to see, so they're likely to hit it, perhaps) would be a good idea. But really excellently-structured interactive video tutorials would be such a good thing to look into, from this start. One of the options in the article workflow "I don't feel confident yet - I want to do the tutorial" as one of the options. Probably the top one! ThatPeskyCommoner 08:02, 14 September 2011 (UTC)