| This page is an early draft.
More information will be provided by February 2026
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Article guidance Article guidanceaims to improve the process of creating articles and sections on Wikipedia through a guided and supported approach. | Start: | 2025-07 |
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Article guidance is an initiative that is in its early stages, led by the Wikimedia Foundation. It aims to develop new approaches that support editors in creating initial well-structured contributions on Wikipedia that align with community policies and content quality. 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 needscaptured in the wishlist,discussions andfeedback with some communities on theArticle creation for new editors idea.
Rationale for an article guidance
[edit]- 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.
- Most of the time, they don't succeed; their articles are deleted as they don't meet the standard quality, because:
- They lack sources
- Their sources are not verifiable
- Are not written neutrally
- Don't follow the required structure
- Impact of AI-generated low quality content
With the advancement in AI, some contributors resort to shortcuts to write articles that don’t meet our community’s standards. - 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 acommunity wishlist and extensively discussed between the Growth team and English Wikipedia community, and are reflected in the feedback from various communities.
Potential opportunities to address the problems
[edit]Based on community feedback and a subsequentresearch study, we have identified potential features for further exploration and testing with communities.
- Help editors find, understand and apply references, which are key elements for successful content creation.
- Identify article types to provide tailored support to new editors.
- Establish community-defined outlines. Collaborate with communities and/or use exemplary articles to establish outlines for different article types.
- Enable quick reuse of content outlines. Suggest basic article components, such as sections, paragraphs, quick facts, infoboxes, etc.
- Highlight key policies. Provide relevant guidance within the editing workflow for each article type.
- Prioritize usability for mobile editing while also supporting desktop users.
- Learning by doing approach that supports users to compose the draft of a well-referenced article.
These ideas reflect existing community practices, where communities have defined structures and guidelines for specific types of articles. There are examples from volunteers (User sandbox+), WikiProjects (such asWikiProject Medicine orWikiProject Primates), and affiliates (such as Wikimedia Brasil's work onMBabel or Wiki Education Foundation’ssubject-specific handouts). However, current content creation tools do not facilitate their discovery or application. We want to expand the capabilities of existing editing tools to support these practices.
This project is in the exploration and early experimental design phase and is seeking community awareness and feedback. We would approach any feature development from an experimental perspective, ensuring exploration is controlled, and analyzed.
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 thetalk page to help improve the initial ideas.
