Artikel-Anleitung
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Article guidance
Article guidance aims to improve the process of creating articles and sections on Wikipedia through a guided and supported approach.
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Article guidance, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, is an experimental feature designed to help less experienced editors create well-structured, policy-compliant Wikipedia articles. It determines the editor's intent based on the article title and type, then provides tailored, community-adjustable guidance throughout the creation process. This includes upfront source validation, notability risk assessment, and initial content structure that provides a minimum structure to get started. By minimizing low-quality submissions, the feature aims to increase the survival rate of new pages created by editors, and reduce the workload for patrollers and administrators. In addition, the feature has been designed to work across platforms with a specific focus on lowering the barrier to contribute on mobile, where creating an article is particularly challenging.
Testing the feature
The feature is available in Simple English, Turkish and French Wikipedia as part of an A/B experiment. It is also enabled but not exposed for the A/B experiment in Bangla, Arabic, Italian, and Polish Wikipedia. Experienced contributors in these wikis are encouraged to create outlines for the feature and to provide feedback. Simple English Wikipedia has outlines for various article types, which can serve as examples with the appropriate markups. Please consider your community's editing principles if you choose to adapt any of those outlines. The feature can also be tried in Test Wikipedia following these instructions. A video below demonstrates how the feature works.
How does the Article Guidance workflow work
Article Guidance is community configurable: each Wikipedia can set its own restrictions and guidelines based on article type. This configuration is defined through outlines. An outline is a community-curated page that feeds the Article Guidance workflow. In an outline, communities can:
- Connect the outline to a Wikidata item to define which article type it applies to
- Set restrictions based on editor experience, source validation, and other parameters
- Add writing tips for that topic
- Indicate recommended and discouraged sources
- Suggest article sections and initial content for that article type
The following Wikipedias have created outlines for their communities:
- Arabischsprachige Wikipedia: ويكيبيديا:إرشاد المقالة/[outline name]
- Bengalische Wikipedia: উইকিপিডিয়া:নিবন্ধ নির্দেশিকা/[outline name]
- Französischsprachige Wikipedia: Projet:Aide à la rédaction d'articles/[outline name]
- Japanischsprachige Wikipedia: Wikipedia:記事執筆のガイド/[outline name]
- Portugiesischsprachige Wikipedia: Wikipédia:OrientaçõesParaArtigos/[outline name]
- Polnischsprachige Wikipedia: Wikipedia:Pomoc redaktorska/[outline name]
- Wikipedia in einfachem Englisch: Wikipedia:Article Guidance/[outline name]
- Spanischsprachige Wikipedia: Wikipedia:GuíadeArtículos/[outline name]
- Türkischsprachige Wikipedia: Vikipedi:MaddeYönergesi/[outline name]
- Persische Wikipedia: ویکیپدیا:راهنمای مقاله/[outline name]
To create an outline and test it in the workflow, the workflow needs to be enabled in your wiki. If it is not yet enabled, you may still create an outline, but it will not render correctly and you will not be able to test the feature with it. Any Wikipedia community can request the feature to be enabled for experimentation purposes, without exposing it to users. You can request it on the project talk page. To learn more about outline structure and markup, or to create an outline from scratch, visit the How to create an outline page.
Feature workflow
Article guidance defines a workflow to assist contributors from the initial stages through writing the article in Visual Editor, using the provided outlines.
Title entry and topic matching
Once a contributor accesses the feature to start a new article, they are prompted to type an article title. The system queries possible topic matches from Wikidata and provides a list of primary topics and close alternatives for the contributor to confirm. This allows the feature to understand which outline to use for that specific editor's article type.
Article type selection
When a contributor cannot confirm a topic match from Wikidata from the article title, they see an option to manually choose a type from a list. If none of the listed types applies, a graceful exit lets the contributor continue without guided help or suggest a new type for community consideration.
Reference checks
Contributors are prompted to provide sources by pasting one or more URLs. Each URL is automatically checked against community-defined lists of recommended and discouraged sources, with real-time feedback. Adding sources at this stage is optional by default, but may be required depending on the article type. Making sources a requirement to move forward is something that communities can define for each article type and also adjust for different editor experience levels.
Notability risk assessment
The feature checks if a proposed article meets community-defined notability standards based on its title, type, and sources. The community can adjust how strict or loose these restrictions are. Some of the restrictions that can be configured are by topic, by editor experience, by Wikidata item match, or by cross-referencing whether an article already exists in other Wikipedias.
Community tips and guidance Contributors are shown tips from experienced editors to help them succeed in writing their article, based on the type of article they want to write. These tips are community configurable in the outlines and can range from surfacing key community policies to more practical tips on tone, style, sources, or structure.
Initial structure for the article
By clicking "Start writing", contributors access the Visual Editor with community-defined structure already in place for the chosen article type. This structure comes from what the community has defined in the outline for that article type and can help the contributor start with a minimum viable skeleton that they can edit with the relevant content for their article.
Experiment phase
The Article Guidance feature is being evaluated through an A/B test targeting junior editors creating articles on mobile. The experiment measures whether guided article creation improves the 30-day survival rate of new articles compared to the default experience, across the pilot Wikipedias. The selected entry point for this phase is red links. The experiment is configured so that a portion of junior editors are shown the Article Guidance workflow when they click a red link, while the rest follow the default article creation experience. This allows a direct comparison of article survival rates between the two groups. Early results across the pilot wikis show a statistically significant improvement in the 30-day survival rate for articles created through the guided workflow. The experiment has also provided useful data on where editors drop off in the workflow and how outline coverage affects the results, which is informing the next phase of development. For the latest results and status updates, see the status updates page.
Rationale for article guidance
The intention is to help new editors easily understand and apply the existing practices and policies, and navigate the task of starting a new article with ease. It is also meant to reduce the workload for administrators, enabling them to safeguard article quality more effectively. This initiative is inspired by community needs captured in the wishlist, discussions and feedback with some communities on the Article creation for new editors idea.
- Creating a new article is motivating, but challenging.
Successfully creating a high-quality, approved article is a tangible accomplishment for an editor and a motivating factor for continued contributions. However, this responsibility and accomplishment comes with challenges and pain points. - Specific rejection reasons for new editors' contributions
New editors, especially, often face the daunting task of:- navigating complex editing policies
- understanding the criteria that moderators and the Wikipedia community expect for good quality content.
- Die meiste Zeit sind sie erfolglos; deren Artikel werden gelöscht, da sie nicht die Qualitätsstandards erfüllen, weil:
- sie keine Quellen haben
- deren Quellen nicht verifizierbar sind
- sie nicht neutral geschrieben sind
- sie nicht die erforderliche Struktur folgen
- Auswirkung von KI-generierten Inhalt mit niedriger Qualität
Mit den Fortschritten in der KI greifen einige Mitwirkende auf Abkürzungen zurück, um Artikel zu schreiben, die die Richtlinien unserer Gemeinschaft nicht erfüllen. - Time patrollers spend reviewing inadequate submissions
Patrollers spend time reviewing and deliberating on low-quality submissions, which creates a heavy backlog of work for them. - Reverted contributions can demotivate editors and exhaust patrollers.
The above problems have also been highlighted in a community wishlist and extensively discussed between the Growth team and English Wikipedia community, and are reflected in the feedback from various communities.
Participate
As we explore this space, we need collaboration with communities to:
- Exchange ideas about the approaches to consider, avoid, try, and measure to evaluate the impact of the project.
- Identify types of articles where guidance could be useful.
- Collaborate to create an initial set of outlines for the selected types of articles.
- Try the use of outlines for article and section creation in their wikis.
Please, share your thoughts in the talk page to help improve the initial ideas and sign up on this page.