Talk:Article guidance

Welcome!

Please share your thoughts or ask any questions you may have about the Article guidance initiative. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:06, 28 November 2025 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF), Would you guys want ideas on what to fix? I'm a bit unsure on what to provide feedback on? Sohom Datta (talk) 18:12, 2 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @Sohom Datta,

As this initiative is in its early stages, we are interested in the following:

1. Exchanging ideas on the approaches we can consider, as well as those we should avoid, to address the problems mentioned on the project page.
2. Discussing the types of articles where guidance would be beneficial.
3. Suggesting Wikipedia communities we can collaborate with to create an initial set of outlines for the selected types of articles.

These are the primary areas where we are seeking feedback. However, please feel free to share any additional thoughts or feedback that you or any other members of PTAC think that could be helpful. Thank you! UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 14:02, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Hello @UOzurumba (WMF),

1. • A part that is missing in my opinion is the ability to chose whether to create the page directly or to create it as a draft (draft in the User namespace or in the Draft namespace depending on the wiki).
   • Although this project targets new editors, the system that is being built would also be useful to experienced editors as there is currently no easy way to use a boilerplate when creating an article. Currently, I think most people either start from scratch or copy/paste content from another article on a similar topic. There is also no proper way to start article creation: either we search for the name and click on the red name or we manually type the name of the article that we want to create in the url bar of the navigator. Having an esay way to find boilerplates would be appreciated. But this would require a more precise selection of topic, with selection of community-defined sub-categories, like "writer" or "athlete" as subcategories of "people" and subsubcategories like "rugby player" or "football player" as subcategories of "athlete". For experienced editors, the parts about url collection and notability warning could be skipped.
2. I don't think there is one type of articles in particular where guidance would be beneficial. All types would benefit from it, although from my personal experience most deleted articles are about people not meeting notability criteria.

Escargot bleu (talk) 12:18, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF)We made a good start at Talk:Growth/Article_creation_for_new_editors/Flow but the Growth Team appears to be looking at more complex solutions including MediaWiki extensions that will be at least another two years in development. These would then followed by trials and testing while other very simple solutions made by community volunteers with professional experience in UI and UX would address these very goals extremely quickly without the time and and expense. @KStoller-WMF we began a constructive dialogue but various ideas seem to be spread around on overlapping projects in different departments. Kudpung (talk) 23:00, 25 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you for sharing the conversations with Growth team. We’re pursuing faster development and testing cycles for this project. Our timeline favours a shorter path from development to testing, though it may shift slightly as the work progresses with community input. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 15:16, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF), I do hope that community input will be taken seriously. The volunteers have grown wary of WMF solutions that have not received much, if any community input and have already proven to be either largely ineffective or having little real impact on areas that need critical - but not lengthy - investigation. I am looking forward to today's virtual meeting. Kudpung (talk) 19:10, 27 February 2026 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF), thanks again for the meeting. I was there but I dd not speak (I was the old man: Kudpung, showing as SPT Pools) . Would it be possible to provide the names of the attendees visible in the video , and to update the list of team members? Some are not registered on any Foundation projects so nothing is known about them or what they do, and some may have left the WMF already.

• @Runa Bhattacharjee
• @Niklas Laxström
• @Pau Giner
• @Sudhanshu Gautam
• @Stephane Bisson
• @Uzoma Ozurumba
• @Fiona Romeo
• @Anbar Jayedi
• @Zaree Singer

Kudpung (talk) 14:47, 1 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, @Kudpung, for attending the meeting. Apologies for the late reply. The names of the attendees are in the meeting document. I have also updated the list of team members on the project page. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 00:38, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

@UOzurumba (WMF), Thank you for replying. I have an upcoming meeting with the WMF to discuss the develoment of a very similar project thyat has been in development for a couple of years already. I do appreciate that this excellent initiative addresses regional Wikipedias but as there is significant overlap, it may help later to pool ideas and avoid duplication of effort.

On another note, perhaps project documents could be best shared on Foundation project pages and not on Google just because Google's free solutions exist. I have reproduced the contents of that document here to simplify the access for other participants:

Attendees:

• User:Victor Lopes (en & pt),
• Dyolf77 (fr & ar),
• Tausheef Hassan,
• Mohd Taufik Rosman,
• Muhammad Yahya,
• Shabab Mustafa,
• SPT pools, user:Kudpung
• Kitamura,
• Rihan,
• Little sunshine(ptwiki),
• Jane Achukwu (igwiki),
• Zahirul Nukman,
• Yaw tuba from Ghana(en, simple, ghanaian wiki),
• User:Nehaoua arwiki and frwiki,
• user: Gerard (WMF),
• user:SGautam (WMF),
• user:AJayedi (WMF),
• user:UOzurumba (WMF),
• user:LDelench (WMF)

Agenda:

Introduction - 5 mins

The meeting started with introductions Office Hour (1): Article guidance

Introduce yourself in the chat

Username?

The wiki you edit

Wikimedia friendly space policy applies here, we will be civil in our conversations.

Presentation - 35 mins

Write your question in the chat during the presentation and we will attend to it during the Q&A

Q&A - 15 mins

Next step - 4 mins

Continue working, in cooperating your feedback

Close - 1 mins

Notes

The meeting started with introductions, and the WMF staff presented their plan, approach and expectations from communities during the project. After the presentation, attendees were invited to ask questions.

Someone from the Portuguese Wiki provided feedback that everything is understood and that they look forward to having this feature soon.

Attendees were encouraged to complete the questionnaire to help the WMF team understand the type of guidance to provide for the feature. To further stress its significance, WMF staff emphasised the importance of this feedback.

As the project progresses, we will schedule another meeting to share our progress and gather feedback to help us iterate. In the meantime, we will communicate and share status updates through the Article guidance project page.

Action items

Kudpung (talk) 01:11, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Thank you @Kudpung. I created this page for our conversations. So, I have documented it there. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 01:27, 10 March 2026 (UTC)

Chapter in Wikipedia: The Missing Manual; also, Editor's Index

Although the (technical) editing process has changed dramatically since 2008, the underlying issues/problems/approaches to writing a new article have not. So I think you'll find this to be useful, at least for identifying lots of things that editors need advice about when creating a new article.

Also, in Wikipedia:Editor's Index to Wikipedia, the section on new articles has links to guidance, essays, etc., here.

Finally, I think that creating a new section and creating a new article are significantly different, since the notability issue is (presumably) not relevant when adding just a section to an existing article. On the editing scale, adding a new section is closer to adding a new paragraph than it is to adding a new article, or even, the next level down, to reorganizing and expanding an article.

John Broughton (talk) 00:28, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Thank you @John Broughton, for your helpful feedback and for directing us to those resources. I appreciate you highlighting the Wikipedia Manual for writing better articles and the Editor's Index on new articles. We will review these as we move forward.

You made a valid point about the distinction between creating a new section and a new article. A new section may still require the addition of verifiable sources and other considerations, which also makes it challenging for new editors.

Thanks again for your interest and for taking the time to share your valuable thoughts as a very experienced Wikipedian. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 16:56, 3 December 2025 (UTC)

Suggest use of Translation tool when article exists in another language

When a corresponding article is already available in another language and the user has access to the content translation feature, the system could recommend translating the existing article rather than creating a new one from scratch. Escargot bleu (talk) 11:35, 24 February 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion, @Escargot bleu.

Currently Content Translation already has among its entry points an invite to translate an article when users create a new article on Visual Editor. This option is shown only when there is a certain degree of certainty about the multilingual experience of the user and the identification of the topic the user is trying to create. There are more details about this feature in the corresponding Phabricator tickets (mobile, and desktop).

The new process of Article Guidance will help to better identify the exact topic in some cases, so there is an opportunity to make this feature more reliable. In any case, the initial goal of the experiment is to learn whether the new guided experience is more effective than the default non-guided one. Based on the results, we can consider for the particular case of multilingual users how to connect the two guided experiences (Article Guidance and Content Translation) when both are possible.

Thanks for your interest in the project, and don't hesitate to share any other thoughts. Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:43, 4 March 2026 (UTC)

Support for surfacing the other language article(s) and mentioning or recommending translation. However, oppose the translation tool as it's not really useful in practice and just makes translation more complicated mainly but not only due to (starting from a) machine translation not being possible with it. Prototyperspective (talk) 22:18, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective, I don't get what you mean. Translation tool precisely makes you start from a machine translation (Google Translate). Escargot bleu (talk) 23:11, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

It depends on the language pair then, this is not possible for many language pairs. The other main issue with the CT tool is what it does to templates, specifically ref templates. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:23, 9 March 2026 (UTC)

Precisely, and since Google Translate is now using AI, the quality has dropped to very often being unusable. One of the problems with inviting users to translate articles is that the users are very often not bilingual and are therefore not able to proofread the machine translation for it accuracy. This wastes the time of the patrollers who are not linguists either and such articles are generally moved to draft ifr they are not ready for mainspace. Kudpung (talk) 07:47, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

Is GT using gen AI by default now? I think it's just neural machine translation and it usually works very well (for text content) except for where there is the max character break and with a few issues here and there that one needs to fix when proofreading. Why would they add sth that reduces quality; it's more likely that more users are trying to undermine the process/functionality and/or the project via low-quality translations.

"One of the problems with inviting users to translate articles is that the users are very often not bilingual" good point, key here – Escargot bleu which languages the user speaks needs to be considered. Maybe only suggest translation if the user specified to speak a language that an existing article is available in or has say 50+ edits in that language's version (inferred secondary language). However, it seems like Escargot bleu's suggestion is flawed from the start anyway: how would the article guidance system know if/which articles already exist if the user did not start from another existing article to begin with? Prototyperspective (talk) 18:35, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

I was referring to the title matching step (T414902), where a wikidata item is searched. The system is already able to find articles in other languages, since communities have the option to restrict article creation to only articles which already exist in five other languages (T415485). Escargot bleu (talk) 19:32, 20 March 2026 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective, Google Translate used to be quite good. As a native level user of some languages I used to let GT do the typing for me, leaving me just to proofread and correct the errors that only a native speaker would recognise. Nowadays, with its use of predictive translation, not only does it often get the tone and semantics wrong, but it occasionally introduces phraseology and lexis that are related in context but which are inappropriate for the target language. Kudpung (talk) 01:01, 27 March 2026 (UTC)

Form

The invitation to fill out a form needs to warn people that the form is hosted outside Wikipedia and state that it is hosted by Google — GhostInTheMachine ^talk 11:57, 19 March 2026 (UTC)

The invitation is no longer there. Nikerabbit (talk) 10:08, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Maybe, but ... as a principle, any invitation to fill out a form needs to warn people if the form is hosted outside Wikipedia (MediaWiki) ... — GhostInTheMachine ^talk 14:09, 31 March 2026 (UTC)

Yes, that is correct. Apologies for missing this. Nikerabbit (talk) 07:02, 1 April 2026 (UTC)

Couldn't find a matching article type

Was testing out the feature to write about the women's health research funding gap, and could not find a matching type (such as social issue). The descriptions of the existing types are quite complicated. Femke (talk) 16:14, 4 April 2026 (UTC)

IMO there is a danger in attempting to address too many article types. Firstly there is the developmental timeframe and cost benefit vs results. Secondly there is the information overload in confronting the the new users with a difficult choice from too many example pages where a maximum of around 10 basic article types would suffice, and then piling on all over again with more TL;DR 'helpful notes and instructions – which is a characteristic of the en.Wiki.

A short study of the New Pages Feed would quickly determine what the the most common article types are nowadays (in fact this has been done empirically already). E.g. bios already appear to represent >50% of new creations. Like you, I'm passionate about making Wikipedia easier to understand, but also easier to create and edit appropriate new articles in the goal of achieving some consistent and sustainable quality at their entry point.

I think that's what this project is all about - it builds on a proposal we offered the WMF already back in 2022. It's nice to see it gaining some traction but a lot more input from the informed community stakeholders like would be great and I think that is coming. The @John Broughton 2008 Missing Manual contained a Wizard that was already far more interactive and intuitive than the 6 static page flipthrough that quietly replaced it a couple of years ago. Kudpung (talk) 16:43, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Thank you, @Femke, for testing the feature and sharing your valuable feedback.

I appreciate you pointing out that there is no outline for social issues articles. We have included an initial version of the outline for Social issue, feel free to review it, try using it to create a new article, and edit the outline further for it to capture the most useful guidance. Outlines are regular wiki pages (with just some extra markup), feel free to create new outlines using the existing ones as a guide. The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create.

You mentioned the descriptions of existing types seem complicated. If you have suggestions or examples to simplify or clarify them, we would appreciate your input. Our goal is to make this as accessible as possible, so your ideas are welcome.

Thank you again, for your time and for helping us improve this for everyone. UOzurumba (WMF) (talk) 18:05, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Issue with title input

Hello,

I tried using the patch demo form as though I wanted to create an article about No Game No Life (television series). After typing No game no, the interface correctly suggested the matching Wikidata item No Game No Life. However, when I clicked on that suggestion, instead of automatically inserting the Wikidata item's title, the form proceeded as if I were creating a new article titled No game no.

It seems that selecting the suggested item does not populate the title field with the corresponding Wikidata label and instead continues with the partially typed query. Escargot bleu (talk) 20:49, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback @Escargot bleu.

As part of the process to capture the user intent, the workflow starts by capturing both the title for the article and the subject it is about using Wikidata. In the example you provided, it makes perfect sense to get the title autocompleted based on the Wikidata selection.

We'll look into more detail to identify whether doing so automatically can cause some unintended surprises for other cases. For example, a user typing "Orange (color)" as the title of their article and selecting the orange Wikidata item (Q39338), may find it also confusing for their title to be changed back to just "orange" automatically.

I created a ticket to explore possible solutions that help with the case reported while not introducing issues for other cases. Feel free to subscribe to the ticket to get updates or share further thoughts. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 11:27, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Some issues

I attempted to create the Bangladesh article.

However, when using sources in another language (in this case, Bangla), I receive the error: “Source check failed. Please try again.” Is this intended behavior?

Additionally, all references in the main article are showing citation errors. I expected the references to be processed through an automatic citation system, similar to how they appear in Wikipedia, so that they would follow the citation format in the article. I was also unable to add additional citations later. I also have encountered #Issue with title input.

Another concern is that the pre-filled article contains “[Country name]” repeated multiple times. Is there a way to define this once so that all instances are automatically replaced, or to have it pre-filled based on the article title? Tausheef Hassan (talk) 07:33, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for your feedback, @Tausheef Hassan.

I was able to reproduce the issue with non-ascii URLs, and I reported it in this ticket for the team to fix it.

Regarding the citation errors in the article (those at the bottom of the published article) they show because the references provided in the initial steps of the workflow are added to the references section automatically, but they are not used in the article. The option to "add citation" should list them in the "Reuse" tab. Maybe the previous error was also getting in the way, but let us know if this is not working as expected.

On your last point, the support for initial contents is very basic for this first iteration. We are exploring more ideas on how to provide guidance while users edit. Surfacing auto-complete suggestions based on available information (from the title, wikidata item, or what the user wrote before) seems like a very good idea. I've added a reference to your comment in the ticket.

Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 10:45, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Citation needed

I made an extremely barebones version of At Hope's Ravine, with some intentional mistakes such as not adding a citation in some places and not following the usual MoS.

I don't think adding {{Citation needed }} at the end of every sentence or paragraph will be all that useful. There's already a massive backlog of uses of that template for people to go through, and the way it's added after every template sentence is excessive and close to tag bombing. I also don't think a new editor would know how to use the citations that were generated in the "show your sources before writing" step, and would assume that because the sources are shown at the bottom that they don't need to add anything inline. I'm not sure what the solutions to these problems are, though - maybe a pop-up of some sort?

Also, I realise this is probably because it's a test wiki, but I couldn't switch to the source editor, which was a bit annoying. As well as this, the Cite pop-up stopped responding for me after trying to enter this link in the Automatic tab, and clicking "Website" in the Manual tab froze the entire browser tab; at least one of these freezes has caused empty references in the text. Suntooooth, it/he (talk | contribs) 15:39, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Side note, a bug that might be unrelated to this test but that I noticed just now when looking at the page I made: I ended my edit summary with ), and in the history it didn't add another closing bracket to match the one automatically added at the start of edit summaries, so the edit summary reads (Create barebones page (based on en:At Hope's Ravine). Suntooooth, it/he (talk | contribs) 21:47, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, @Suntooooth.

The focus of the initial intervention is mostly on the workflow the user experiences before getting to the Visual Editor. In this intervention, the initial contents are presented in Visual Editor all at once, without the need for additional custom user interfaces. In this way, we can learn quickly while exploring other ideas for upcoming interventions. Recently we have been exploring ideas on how to provide guidance while editing that may expand some of the capabilities in the future.

Currently, the "citation needed" templates are used as an already-available solution to convey the expectation of a reference to be added and work as a quick access to add those. The outlines that define guidance message and ocntents (including the use of "citation needed" templates) can be edited as wiki pages. We provided an initial set of outlines as examples in the test instance for general review, but as those get transferred to the pilot wikis each community can refine those further. If there is any general change that may apply globally, feel free to edit the example outlines.

On your later points, the test instance is very basic and may be missing some of the common functionality from production wikis such as Wikipedia. Once we complete the deployment process, it should be possible to test the feature on a more realistic environment.

Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:47, 14 April 2026 (UTC)

@Pginer-WMF, please surface en:Help:Finding sources somewhere or integrate its advice, imo newbies often struggle with finding appropriate sources (and often don't know Google Scholar or Google Books exist). I'm also not a fan of how scholarly sources are usually given less prominence in the advice on sourcing, these are usually the sources to base an article on, and then supplement it with data, news reports etc. (basically, start with the best sources, usually one or more high quality overview sources that have the same scope as the article) Kowal2701 (talk) 00:23, 2 May 2026 (UTC)

Couldn't find a matching article type

Building -- Althair (talk) 15:12, 19 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, @Althair.

The current set of outlines in the test instance were defined as an initial set of examples. Outlines are created as regular wiki pages. If you are interesting on trying the process of outline creation, feel free to start a new outline for "Building". In this case, the article tye will be "Q41176" which corresponds to the concept of "Building" in Wikidata.

The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create. We are interested in hearing about feedback for the process of creating the outlines too. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:46, 20 April 2026 (UTC)

Couldn't find a matching article type

It is necessary to add a type that would be suitable for articles about aspects of something (e.g. w:Geography of Japan, w:Rugby in Oman, w:Religious views of William Shakespeare) and thematic "intersections" of objects: (e.g. w:Donald Trump and fascism, w:Grapefruit–drug interactions, w:Cannabis and sports). Таёжный лес (talk) 14:28, 27 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the input, @Таёжный лес.

The current set of outlines in the test instance was defined as an initial set of examples. Outlines are created as regular wiki pages. If you are interested in trying the process of outline creation, feel free to start new outlines. Based on the examples provided, the outlines could be:

• Geography of geographic location based on Q46865913
• Aspect in region based on Q74817647
• Religious views by individual based on Q63368109 or a more general Certain aspects of a person's life based on Q20127274
• Food-drug interaction based on Q3153082
• The example about Donald Trump was classified in Wikidata as "Comparison" (Q1720648) which seems quite broad/abstract for a useful outline (to have common structure and guidance across the many different cases of comparisons), and the example about sports didn't had an "instance-of" property to identify a suitable type.

The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create. We are interested in hearing about feedback for the process of creating the outlines too. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 14:30, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Error Message in Error

Just tried to experiment with the tool and pretended to write an article about a German historian, professor and director of a well known museum on maritime history and technology. Entered the name, clicked on the WikiData Q-item and got the message: To create an article about this subject, it must already exist in other Wikipedias.

An article about her exists in deWP and is listed in WikiData. Is this intentional or an issue? --H-stt (talk) 17:13, 29 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for sharing your experience with the tool, @H-stt.

The tool is working as expected. The Person outline in the test instanceis defined with a notability risk assessment of "sources wikidata" which means that (a) providing sources upfront is mandatory and (b) the article has to exist in 5 other languages. This can be defined differently by each particular Wikipedia based on the current tags provided (as the project is in early development we can also consider providing new tags or adjusting the criteria for exiating ones). Note also that while the Person outline may be more restrictive, it is possible to define overlapping outlines with a different criteria. For example, the Actor outline in the test instance is only limited to articles for items that exist on Wikidata without any requirement about being available in multiple language Wikipedias.

Hope this is useful to clarify. Let us know if there is any further question or suggestion on how we can make the system better. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 12:21, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Remove categorization of ArticleGuidance pages

Hello,

Currently, article guidance outlines are added to article and maintenance categories although they are not actual articles and they are not expected to be fixed. See for example fr:Special:Info/Wikipédia:Aide à la rédaction d'articles/Personne#mw-pageinfo-hidden-categories and this edit from a contributor unaware of the ArticleGuidance project. Could you add a way to remove this categorization? Escargot bleu (talk) 08:53, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for reporting this @Escargot bleu.

Just to confirm the issue: An outline like People in French Wikipedia includes at the end of the contents the "Catégorie:Personne" markup. This adds the relevant category to the articles about people created with Article Guidance. However, this has unintended consequences: since the outline page has the "Personne" category, it is listed in reviewer workflows as a biography to review when it is not the case (it is the outline to create biographies, not a biography).

Some possible solutions:

1. Remove the category from the outline wiki pages. Articles created with them won't be categorized automatically, but that may not be a big issue since articles created currently are also not automatically categorized.
2. Explore some technical way for categories on outlines not to be considered by the system in the usual way.

We can look into more options, but I wanted to confirm that the problem was described correctly.

Please let us know if there is any relevant consideration I may have not captured. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 12:31, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

@Pginer-WMF

You understood it correctly, except that there is no biography review workflow; instead, there is maintenance of pages for which subcategories indicate an issue (first link in my previous message) or inappropriate categories.

In the particular case of Person outline, this category can be removed since it is a general category and more specific subcategories are expected to be used, like Category:Born in XXXX.

If possible, I would prefer option 2, since some common templates automatically add hidden categories that we cannot easily remove. Escargot bleu (talk) 12:46, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

I created a ticket in Phabricator to explore a technical way for outlines to capture which categories to add to articles without the outline pages being categorized themselves. Feel free to tack the progress or share any comment in the task. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 14:46, 30 April 2026 (UTC)

Fossil taxon outline

How can I make pages for taxa (whose Wikidata item is tagged with instance of (P31) fossil taxon (Q23038290)) default to Project:ArticleGuidance/Fossil instead of Project:ArticleGuidance/Animal? Chaotic Enby (talk) 05:04, 3 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback @Chaotic Enby. The "Fossil" outline seems to be properly defined, and the system was expected to pick the more specific one, but it is not happening. I created a ticket in Phabricator to capture the issue for the team to investigate. Feel free to tack the issue there or add any additional details that may be relevant.

Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 08:06, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot! Chaotic Enby (talk) 08:17, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Adapting outlines to Wikipedia editions

I've been wondering about the translation part. While we encourage outlines to be directly translated, different Wikipedia editions usually vary in their notability criteria, so the advice to give might be different in each case. For example, Any animal species that has been given a formal scientific name in a peer-reviewed publication is considered appropriate for a Wikipedia article. refers to en:WP:NSPECIES, but French Wikipedia does not have an equivalent guideline. This can also happen the other way around: French Wikipedia has a two-year criterion on lasting source coverage, which isn't a thing on the English Wikipedia, and directly translating our guidance from the latter may lead to French Wikipedia notability being wrongly presumed at for some local events. Chaotic Enby (talk) 09:05, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, @Chaotic Enby. The idea is for the outlines to be specific to each wiki, and reflect wiki-specific guidance for specific types of articles (following the policies and conventions of each wiki). The initial set of outlines in the test instance were defined in English as it is the common working language for the team, but their purpose is to allow testing the system and be used as a starting point to adapt them to other communities.

At the current stage of the process, we are asking communities from the pilot wikis to "adapt and translate" the initial set of example outlines. We have documented the process to facilitate the creation of an initial set of relevant outlines based on the examples, but communities can create a different set and adjust their contents to better reflect their practices. For example, we invite the French Wikipedia community to create the outlines in their wiki as sub-pages. Once the feature is deployed, the outlines on the specific pilot wikis will render in a nicer way, and it will be possible to try them in the article guidance workflow.

Hope this clarifies the process a bit. If there is any confusing part or any suggestion for improving it, just let us know. Anything that helps communities to complete this step in the best way will be helpful. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:43, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for the clarification! I've been wondering if the set of outlines each Wikipedia edition uses might vary because of that, but I don't think that would necessarily be a problem either? Chaotic Enby (talk) 17:02, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

In these cases, it is often helpful to find a balance that allows customization while not generating unnecessary fragmentation. We could imagine the possibility of having some global outlines (e.g., defined at meta) that could be overriden by those defined in the local Wikipedias. This is just one rough idea; other approaches are possible. We have not explored this space yet since the immediate focus is on the experiment to evaluate whether this type of guidance has an impact. If that is the case, we will explore options about how to best scale the approach.

In any case, if you have any thoughts about this, don't hesitate to share them.

Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 17:17, 8 May 2026 (UTC)

Improve user experience with custom forms

Outlines contain repeated elements like [Full name], [year] or genders. I think it would be better user experience if before opening visual editor an outlined-customed form was displayed allowing to fill all these fields. I know of an old tool (in french) that offered such forms for mangas and animes articles : https://abda.toolforge.org/formulaire.html. There doesn't need to be as much fields, but at least name and gender would reduce repetitive work. Escargot bleu (talk) 14:05, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

And when a Wikidata item is found, most of these fields could be filled using wikidata data. Escargot bleu (talk) 14:17, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, @Escargot bleu. It makes perfect sense to explore ideas on how reduce typing efforts by reducing repetition. The initial intervention of Article guidance is mostly focused on the workflow that takes place before reaching Visual Editor. The initial transfer of contents is not ideal and we have been exploring ideas on how to provide support while the user is editing the article. I added your comments into the corresponding Phabricator ticket for those ideas to be considered as the work moves forward in this front. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:50, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Request for support: cucumber salad (Q132717554) on wiki_b24e11a4f1__main

Trying to add cucumber salad brought me here. I feel like food might be a pretty reasonable category to have. Freedom4U (talk) 17:59, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

And most of the types of human feel like they'd just make more sense being merged into the human category (is an article on a celebrity really that different from an article on an actor?). Same with having "institutions" (instead of schools and museums being separate categories). Freedom4U (talk) 18:01, 5 May 2026 (UTC)

The intended benefits of having outlines for specific sub-types of subjects, as is the case of humans (e.g., celebrity vs. actor), are that:

• Different restrictions can be applied when these represent a different level of notability risk. For example, a community may decide that actors are required to exist on Wikidata when created by junior editors, while celebrities may require more strict restrictions since it is often problematic in their wiki and it could be set to need to be covered by other wikis in order to let anyone create an article about them.
• More context-specific guidance can be provided. Not only with the contents to reflect specific policies or manual of style recommendations, but also recommended/discouraged source for each type.

Having said that, we plan to measure the impact of the different outlines during the experiments and learn which are the key types of articles to cover the majority of the cases (or those more often leading to deletions) and at which point having more outlines may get diminishing returns. Ultimately, each community can determine which types of articles to support and to which extent. Pginer-WMF (talk) 14:29, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback, @Freedom4U.

The current set of outlines in the test instance was defined as an initial set of examples. Outlines are created as regular wiki pages. If you are interested in trying the process of outline creation, feel free to start new outlines. Based on the example, an outline for "Food" (Q2095) may be useful (unless a more specific type is preferred).

The feature’s home page and this page has a guide to the markups in the article outline to help you understand the relevant sections as you start. You’re also welcome to invite others with expertise to collaborate, review the outline, or share their thoughts on the outline you create. We are interested in hearing about feedback for the process of creating the outlines too. Thanks! Pginer-WMF (talk) 15:55, 6 May 2026 (UTC)

Support for a default outline

Currently, if no outline corresponds to the article I want to write — for example, there is currently no relevant type for philosophical concepts —, my only option is to suggest a new type. It would be nice to also provide a very basic default outline — which for example would ask for sources and would be published as a draft — so that newcomers do not stay hanging with no possibility to create an article. Escargot bleu (talk) 11:24, 10 May 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the suggestion @Escargot bleu. In general, it makes sense to consider whether in the absence of an outline, parts of the process may still be useful. For the experiment, we wanted to evaluate the potential of the proposal when all the elements are present in the best possible way, since the concept of providing context-specific guidance is a key one we want to learn about. Making it explicit when an item is not properly supported allows us to identify relevant gaps that may benefit from having an outline and encourage their creation.

Having said that, the current system would allow defining outlines associated with very general Wikidata items. For example, associating an outline to the Wikidata Metaclass (Q19478619) may match with almost any concept that does not have a more specific outline defined for it. That could be used as a default generic outline, but there is not much specific advice or content that can be provided. Maybe there is a small set of general topics that, while being very broad to cover most topics, can still provide some contextual guidance.

In any case, by designing an open system, it is up to the different communities to try different approaches and find what works best for them. Pginer-WMF (talk) 20:26, 13 May 2026 (UTC)

Annoyance

This feature has become a nuisance for me. Why can’t I disable it because I don’t need the outline I can’t easily create redirects from Redlinks. There is no instructions to opt out. --Cyberwolf (talk) 19:15, 14 May 2026 (UTC)

To be honest, I'm in the same boat of finding it a bit of a nuisance. I feel like there should be a way to opt out of it if you meet a certain criteria (whether that be something like having at least patroller or autoconfirmed, or having created X amount of articles). ShadowBallX (talk) 04:00, 15 May 2026 (UTC)