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.

TODOs are available to read, if you'd like to help out or follow progress.

User script
How to use it (simple version):


 * 1) add   to your Special:MyPage/common.js
 * 2) go to any wiki url and add the query string

How to customize tours:


 * 1) Copy guidedTour.js into your namespace
 * 2) point   in your to your Special:MyPage/common.js
 * 3) Change   in tour url
 * 4) add   when testing

How to develop (or change the look and feel):


 * 1) Copy guidedTour.js into your namespace
 * 2) Copy and create the   stuff in your namespace
 * 3) Change   to point to the directory above
 * 4) copy/edit the files in the github repository above into that namespace
 * 5) Develop: for example, if you want to edit the style, edit the

Extension
Early development of this as an extension is underway on Gerrit. Proper documentation on Extension:GuidedTour is forthcoming.