Wikipedia article creation workflow improvements

This specification describes a project of the Wikimedia Foundation's Growth team.

Star Corporate Vietnam
Star Corporate Vietnam provides investment, business development and management services to foreign investors entering into the Vietnamese market. It is located in District 1, Ho Chi Minh City. The company is a joint venture Australian-Vietnamese company that was founded by Australian citizen, Dr. Christopher Alan Jones. When Vietnam opened its doors to foreign investment in December 1987, Dr. Jones entered the investment arena in his capacity of Manager, Special Projects, for an Australian-based management and investment company undertaking a nationwide aquaculture development project.

Dr. Jones founded Star Corporate Vietnam when the Vietnamese Government ratified its amended Foreign Investment Law in July 2006. For the first time this allowed foreigners to open private service-oriented companies that provide investment, business development and management services to both new and established foreign investors.

Dr. Jones currently serves as President and CEO. The minority Vietnamese joint venture partner is Madam Nguyen Thi Huan, who serves as Director, Government Liaison Services.

Project scope
The following describes what we're going to take on during this project. If anything is unclear, please ask. In most cases, it is safer to assume something is not in scope.

Our primary goal is to improve creation of content pages (i.e. articles) by new contributors to Wikipedia, across language editions.

Our initial scope does not include: creating pages outside the main content namespace -- so no Talk namespaces, Wikipedia namespace pages, or User namespace pages. Also we're focused on creating encyclopedia articles, not other kinds of content pages for Wikimedia projects such as Wiktionary, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, etc. Our scope likewise doesn't include creating pages in third party MediaWiki installations, which may be focusing creating things other than encyclopedia articles. Since content translation is being supported with a custom toolset, we will assume for this project that users should be creating new content from scratch.

User experience
Wikipedia article creation is an extremely complex system of workflows, especially when including potential systems for draft creation or page deletion. We have broken down the process in to three broad steps:


 * 1) Discovery: how users find pages to create, and the starting point for creating them.
 * 2) Authorship: the process and tools for creating a new article, from the perspective of the primary creator
 * 3) Feedback: what happens after a page is published, including feedback on encyclopedic quality through new page patrolling, deletion nominations, and finding fellow collaborators

We intend to experiment with solutions to each of these areas in sequential order.

Discovery
Currently, users can discover pages to create in three ways:


 * 1) via entering in the URL directly
 * 2) via Search. Special:Search includes messages that can direct a user to the red link for a page that doesn't exist
 * 3) via a red link in a page, including lists of desired articles in a wiki page for requests

Authorship
The key decision at this point of the user experience is whether the authors intends to:


 * 1) Create and publish immediately in the main content namespace
 * 2) Create a draft. This current happens via several methods, including...
 * 3) * Userspace. While some new authors may occasionally use a method like posting a draft on their userpage directly, far more common is to use a subpage in their userspace, typically either User:Foobar/Sandbox or User:Foobar/Title.
 * 4) * Custom draft submission and review systems. These vary per Wikipedia and not universal by any means, as they are not a built-in feature of MediaWiki. On Russian Wikipedia, there is an Incubator (Википедия:Инкубатор), and on English there are several systems that currently overlap.

Our first question to answer in this area is where is it best to encourage new authors to create encyclopedia articles? Even if all authors have the option to create pages and publish them immediately, is it helpful to new authors to have a "safe space" to develop an article more slowly? After answering this question, we will be able to develop more tools to assist in creating articles that are appropriate for Wikipedia.

One possibility is to suggest that articles should be started in a Draft namespace before being published in the main content namespace.

Feedback
Currently, articles that are immediately published enter the system of new page patrol. On most wikis, this happens via RecentChanges or Special:NewPages. On English Wikipedia in specific, this also happens via the Page Curation system. Currently, we do not intend to make significant, if any, changes to these systems for patrolling pages.

Research and data
See Research:Wikipedia article creation on Meta for our hypotheses, testing plans, associated data analysis, and qualitative research.