Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2013/February

Tabs

Hi, folks! I found this example of navigable tabs, and I'd love to use it in the Spanish-language Wikipedia portals? . How do I copy that tabs system? Thanks! --NaBUru38 (talk) 18:26, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Should we add GuidedTour?

The Wikimedia Foundation's Editor Engagement Experiments team have recently built a new extension called 'GuidedTour'. GuidedTour allows individual sites to design a guided tour that helps new users understand how to edit. Full details are here. It has been rolled out to English Wikipedia.

I think we should request the Wikimedia Foundation enable it for Wikinews so that we can build a guided tour for writing a new article. The tour would guide new users from registration to writing a new synthesis article: reminding them of the basics of writing (the 5 W's of lead writing, NPOV), ensuring there are sources and categories, and then once they've gone through the writing process, submitting for review.

If the Foundation turns the extension on, we can start building and testing such a guided tour ourselves. Admins can activate or deactivate tours and modify them. What do people think? —Tom Morris (talk) 22:33, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

If Wikinewsies are interested, just let us know by pinging me directly or filing a bug. We deploy every Thursday, and adding it here is simple. Steven (WMF) (talk) 01:50, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. -- CalF (talk) 19:54, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

I have doubts, myself. I don't really know how to come down on the issue, until I have time to study the thing properly, but meanwhile, here are the concerns I'll be looking to dispel or confirm when I get a chance to properly investigate the extension:

When someone first comes here, they're probably in a hurry. That's the nature of news. Most people (with some exceptions, Laura being a spectacular one) first come here because they already have in hand a specific current story they want to write up. I have tried to write down what I think they most need to know, making it short and giving it such a self-important name that they might actually look at it: WN:Pillars of Wikinews writing. But even that is asking them to spend a bunch of time reading before they start on the article. What I believe we need, direly, is an interactive wizard that leads them through the process of actually writing the article they want. That's what I mean my interactive tools to support.

I'm guessing this guided tour thing is a look-at-this-beforehand thing. And if we introduce it, it'll be one more thing to learn to use and then to pour time into applying. --Pi zero (talk) 20:13, 8 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi. I'm the primary developer on the guided tour extension, so let me try to provide some more information.. I think you definitely can use GuidedTour in a wizard workflow. It is not intended as a look-at-this-beforehand thing. We are using it to encourage actual edits (while taking the tour) right now on Wikipedia.

One approach you can try is making a tour called myfirstarticle. Then, you would link to https://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Writing_an_article?tour=firstarticle . That would automatically load the tour, at which point you could have a tooltip (see File:Screenshot of GettingStarted Save step.png for the appearance) point them directly to the "Create page" textbox (you could have an optional central overlay before that), explain what it is, and tell them what to click. Then, when they land on the edit page, you can explain the preloaded elements, how to preview, etc.

I think you should consider trying it out, and I'm glad to answer questions. Superm401 | Talk 08:12, 12 February 2013 (UTC)