Create a new article - feature update launching next week

Toughpigs January 29, 2010

We're updating a feature on Wikia next week, making the "Create a new article" process a little easier for new contributors.

The hardest thing about writing is staring at a blank page -- anyone who uses wikis knows that it's a lot easier to revise an existing page than to start one from scratch! That's especially true for new contributors, who aren't quite sure how to put their first wiki pages together.

When the update launches next week, clicking on the "Create a new article" link in the sidebar will open a dialog box that asks for the title of the new article. The box also offers a "standard layout" for new pages, which includes an image placeholder and two section headings. If a contributor wants to start with a blank page instead, then they can choose "blank page". This dialog also appears when a contributor clicks on a red link, with the link title filled in as the name of the new article.

The standard layout can be customized per wiki, so a community can create their own layout for a basic content page by editing MediaWiki:Newpagelayout.

A couple more notes for experienced folks: Creating a page by typing the name into the browser bar is unchanged; it gives you the blank page instead of the dialog box. Also, if you'd prefer to have the blank page be the default for you, then you'll be able to change it in your Preferences, under the Editing tab.

You can preview the new update on this test wiki -- give it a spin and see how it works. We want to give folks the chance to customize their standard layout before the update goes live early next week, so feel free to play with it, and let us know what you think!

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I’m inclined to say that this was a well-intentioned failure, but I personally wouldn’t want to write it off just yet, as there are smart people here on community central that may be able to figure it out a bit more. You’re right in saying that people sometimes just won’t replace these sorts of things no matter what. Even a bright neon flashing light would probably go unnoticed, which makes me wonder if these pre-formatted pages are all that effective and/or necessary, since the majority of people (I would assume) see other pages before they edit their own and tend to get a feel for what they should look like.
Since the HTML comments won’t work in the RTE (I don’t use it so that slipped my mind altogether, good call), is there any sort of comment that can be added that would be visible, or is that just impossible in a WYSIWYG editor?

April 1, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
I've been looking at the pre-formatted pages, and wondering if it's actually working or not. I've also seen some people not replacing or deleting the section headings.
It's hard to give people a suggested format in a way that actually gets them to use it properly. We used to have elements on the starter kit that said "Welcome to (Wiki Name)", and we saw people replacing the text but keeping the parentheses -- "Welcome to (Parakeet Wiki)". People tend to copy whatever you put in, sometimes even if it says "Replace this text".
I don't think HTML comments are the right answer -- those won't appear in the WYSIWYG editor, which is what new contributors are using. I'm still thinking about the right way to do this.
I'd appreciate hearing more thoughts and feedback about how the pre-formatted pages are working on the wikis...

April 1, 2010 by Toughpigs
Maybe this was mentioned earlier (70 posts is a lot to read through), but would it be possible to add a hidden notice into the == Section heading == coding? What I'm essentially suggesting is something like:
== Section heading  ==
Nothing really major or anything, but I think it would help. The reason I bring this up is because I see a lot of people assuming that the section they're writing in is supposed to be called "Section heading," so they just leave it as is. Alternatively, they also sometimes just write an introduction and then leave the empty sections.
It's not a big deal, but it does get a little old having to remove it from people's articles. Something like this wouldn't fix it all, of course, but it'd probably go a ways to alleviating it somewhat.
Any feedback on this?

March 31, 2010 by Brandon Rhea
Many thanks for the fix!

March 30, 2010 by Ciencia Al Poder
It's done! The code was released this morning. You should now see an option in Preferences, under the Editing tab: "Disable Create Page pop-up".
So I'm sorry that it took so long to get the change up on the site. I'm glad it's up now, and I hope that it helps the people who were bothered by the pop-up. Thanks again for the feedback and thanks for being patient.

March 30, 2010 by Toughpigs
Seeing that it's been a week -- what's the progress so far?

March 30, 2010 by Sulfur
Thanks for the update - much appreciated!

March 22, 2010 by Charitwo
Hi guys -- I'm sorry that it's taken so long to add the preference for disabling this feature for individual users. The ticket had to wait until we were finished with some new project work, and those projects got pushed back unexpectedly. There is an engineer assigned for this, and it will get done by next week.

March 22, 2010 by Toughpigs
Toughpigs 15:31, 12 February 2010 "I'm looking into creating a preference for turning off the pop-up per user. I can't promise when that will happen, but I'm hearing your feedback, and I'm working on it. Thanks for your thoughts."
Toughpigs 15:08, 19 February 2010 "I've got a ticket filed with engineering about adding a user preference to disable the feature for an individual user."
Danny, this has been at least a month and absolutely nothing has been done, and it is still extremely frustrating. A good example is when trying to restore a page from a red link, you can't without a lot of work...and the whole idea is extremely disadvantageous to people who've been working with wikis for years.

March 14, 2010 by Charitwo
history
Here's what I came up with for the Phineas and Ferb Wiki. I added it to the menu in MediaWiki:Monaco-sidebar. It bypasses the new "create a new article" feature, but for wikis with several different kinds of layouts, it may work for them too.

March 9, 2010 by RRabbit42
MediaWiki:newarticletext appears not to be the best way to present multiple layouts to choose from since it is also inserted in front of all other new pages that are created, including other MediaWiki: pages. Thanks to some help from the people on #wikia, I've figured out how to make this work properly and will implement it after announcing it to the rest of the P&F Wiki.

February 24, 2010 by RRabbit42
Update: I just found it. It's MediaWiki:newarticletext. Now I just need to figure out how to make it work.

February 23, 2010 by RRabbit42
I'd be interested to know how the Doctor Who TARDIS Index got the "Preloadable topic outlines" option. (http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/Special:CreatePage). It doesn't seem to be working at the moment, but the customized message at the top and the ability to select more than one outline would solve the problem of wikis that have multiple layout templates.

February 23, 2010 by RRabbit42
This new feature has completely made a mess of hundreds of red links I have in tables, as when you try to create the page which has a "&" in the tittle it truncates it (as also happens if used in the Image upload caption box as well, but i had become aware of thats so just added caption to page after the image upload and link). To replace the "&" with "and" is not really practical as it is not the correct name and there may be several thousand instances already to update. - (this is on Tractors.wikia ) - BulldozerD11 01:49, February 22, 2010 (UTC)

February 22, 2010 by BulldozerD11
Both the image placeholder and the section headings are encouraging people to add images and sections for the sake of images and sections, rather than because they are necessary.
On the Yu-Gi-Oh! Wiki people are often using this to create articles for groups of cards. They see that two sections are "needed", so they create sections for combos in the card game that they've come up with, involving the cards, which is quite annoying when our mainspace isn't for individual users original ideas.
Irrevant sections can be avoided, by presetting the section names, but that can't be done with just one standard layout. e.g. if there was a "character layout", "Personality" and "Biography" could be used as section names.
The feature does have potential, if we were given more than one layout. Tables and infoboxes are what new users typically have problems with. If they could specifiy what type of page they want to create, those could be preloaded.

February 20, 2010 by Deltaneos
When will be disabled this pop-up for Special:DoubleRedirects? Its really annoying, and CTRL+Click doesn't even open a new window to circumvent this.

February 19, 2010 by Ciencia Al Poder
I've got a ticket filed with engineering about adding a user preference to disable the feature for an individual user.
I'm not sure we can fix the template issue -- we tried when it came up for the automatic welcomes, and we couldn't figure it out. Since that's a problem for you on Redwall, I disabled the new create page extension there. I hope that helps!

February 19, 2010 by Toughpigs
Any updates? I've since had to blank my default layout page because of the template issue.

February 17, 2010 by LordTBT
Is there any way this will be usable/relational to a pre set style, or each wiki's manual of style. A set of locked pages that are effectively templates , and are led to from a tab after entering a title in the search box, for the relevant article, such as; Character, Item, Episode, Season, Film, Location, Faction etc - would need a link I guess, to pull up the relevant pre-formatted 'template page'. Then the user creates the article. This would encourage new users to add 'more' information, rather that just one line. One wiki had a load of one line stubs (25 or so), overnight. I'm sure many of those would have been created with at least more info and encouraged more detail, more thought too.
€0.02

February 16, 2010 by Piandao
Small bug on the Special:DoubleRedirects page. The red (Edit) link next to a double redirect brings up the pop up when clicked even though the page itself exists.

February 15, 2010 by Grunny