New editor experiences: Creating an article

Providing users with robust information and media when creating new articles

Last updated: 2022-12-16 by APaskulin (WMF)
Status: v1 published September 2021

Narrative

Eleanor is a history student from Costa Rica. She wants to add an article about a historical figure that doesn't have an article in any of the Wikipedia languages yet. She knows many facts about the historical figure and has many references and citations, but she's not sure how to start actually writing.

Eleanor can receive suggestions for links and media that relate to the topic she’s working on, and use these pieces to build the article for her specific notable person. These related images, dictionary definitions, books, and sources can help Eleanor write the article in a way that truly represents the subject matter and demonstrates their contribution to history with citations and links to other topics.

Enabled by these architecture patterns

Canonical data model: Because the content is stored as pieces of information with metadata that interrelates them, the system can help Eleanor discover relevant, structured content based on tags and other metadata.
Loose coupling: The technical ability to have distinct subsystems means that we can use different subsystems to add context to the information for different products and tools, making it easier to iterate and experiment. These tools can assign topics to pieces of content based on Wikidata items, or use other machine-learning operations to contextualize the different pieces of content to be able to fetch specific information that is useful for the needs of the user.