The Growth team, and Growth team Ambassadors, are starting to collect community feedback about this project idea. We will collect feedback in English, French, Spanish, Czech, Bengali, and Arabic, and then summarize community feedback on this project page. I imagine most of the conversations will happen on Wikipedia talk pages, but wanted to also create thread here as well:
The Growth team is exploring a project idea that aims to improve the experience of new editors by providing them with better guidance and structure in the article creation process. The hope being that by providing new editors with more structure around article creation, it will lead to newcomers creating fewer low-quality articles that create work for patrollers who check recent edits and mentors who review newcomers’ drafts.
In 2022, about 28% of newly registered users who completed the Welcome Survey indicated that they opened an account specifically to create a new article [1]. These newcomers don't yet understand core Wikipedia principles and guidelines around notability, verifiability, conflict of interest, neutral point of view, etc. These newcomers need additional guidance or they end up frustrated and disappointed when their articles get deleted. Because they aren't receiving the proactive guidance they need, they end up creating additional work for content moderators who need to provide reactive guidance which is rarely well-received or well-understood.
While the specifics of the project, and the Growth team’s annual planning priorities, are still under consideration, we anticipate exploring ideas related to Article creation improvements for new editors. One possibility is a community configurable "Article wizard" or helper, which could also fulfill the 2023 Community Wishlist survey Reference requirement for new article creation proposal (ranked #26 out of 182 proposals).
We're committed to shaping the overall plan based on community feedback and needs, while adhering to the following requirements:
- The feature will be Community configurable, enabling each community to customize it to meet their unique needs.
- The feature will provide guidance and guardrails to help newcomers create higher-quality articles and improve their overall experience.
- The feature will be designed to reduce the downstream workload for content moderators (patrollers, admins, watchlisters, etc.).
So, we would love to hear from you:
- Do you think this project will help new page patrollers on Wikipedia?
- Do you have any suggestions for improving this idea?
- Is there anything about this idea that you find concerning, or you want to ensure we avoid?
Or do you want the Growth team to consider a totally different idea? Keep in mind that the Moderator Tools team and two other teams are also working on the shared “improve the experience of editors with extended rights” key result, so there will be other teams approaching this key result from a less new-editor centric perspective.