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Community Wishlist Survey 2023/Editing/Structure request pages

< Community Wishlist Survey 2023 | Editing

Structure request pages

  • Problem: Some communities have tried to structure request pages: request for deletion, for undeletion, requests to admins, request to merge or split pages, request to proofread a draft, request to provide permission to reuse an image, and more. These usages vary from wiki to wiki, but they all lack formal structuring.
When someone wants to submit a request on wiki, they have to take the information from an information page, and then submit their request on a different page. It is okay if you already know the local culture, how the process works, or if the submission is simple (for instance, voting is easy). It is much more complicated if you need to provide multiple, different items, which are not clearly defined to you. Even with preloads and editnotices, it is not always helping. The abandonment rate can be high, as users tend to give up when something is complicated.
A simple example: to submit this wish, I had to use wikitext, and fill the different fields of a template as if I was using a text processor. Hopefully, I'm an experienced user to know how to handle it. Guidance wasn't provided while writing this wish (or I missed it). Even if very best efforts have been put to streamline wishes submissions, it would be much better if a proper, well designed tool was available, and not only for this survey.
  • Proposed solution: The idea is to offer community customizable forms, to create proper step by step. Each step would complete the previous one. Each step by step would be sorted locally, like a template. They could be JSON based, as more and more customization options now exist on wiki (TemplateData, Growth Community configuration, etc.)
  • Who would benefit: People less accustomed to our way of submitting requests, but anyone could enjoy a more guided way to submit requests.
  • More comments: Here is an example on how we could structure undeletion requests. At the moment, cases I saw go from a blank page with a wikitext template to fill to a tentative of step by step where you have to memorize each step before submitting the request.
    It would be replaced by the following:
  1. fill which article you'd like to undelete
  2. what is your source 1? This step provides guidance (you can say that Facebook is not a source there and, even better, the form prevent users from submitting it)
  3. Same as step 2, for the second source.
  4. fill your undeletion reasons
  5. Recap, and post. The form posts the request on the right page, with the proper request template, the two sources listed and the justification (and signature!).

Discussion

Voting

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