[WikiEN-l] Preloaded new article forms to help the newbies?

Tue Mar 22 01:36:41 UTC 2005

I wrote this in passing on wikitech-l and thought I might run
it past wikien-l as an idea.

Go on new article patrol. You'll see decent stuff from old hands,
but a lot of new stuff is awful. Well-meaning awful, but awful.

When the page for creating a new article comes up, would it be
useful to include an article skeleton? Something like the
following:

   '''Article name''' is ...

   Detail on Article name ...

   Further detail on Article name ...

   ==References==

   *List your sources here.

   ==External links==

   *List relevant external links that are not already references.

The idea is that this isn't compulsory at all - but may be a
helpful starter for newbies.

An analogy is writing bug reports in Bugzilla. You can more or
less write something freeform, but the avg. quality of Mozilla's bug
reports went way up when they started using a default reporting form
(Bugzilla Helper) which set out a good bug report step by step.

The above resembles my idea of how to write a short article (see my
recent creations [[Federated Naming Service]] and [[LBX]] for how I
write new short articles). Others will doubtless have their own ideas.

Is this a useful idea? Do new article patrollers think it will help?

- d.

ps: both articles named above were cases of "I wonder what that actually
is, oh! there's no articles yet, I think I'll find out and write them up."
Helped by being temporarily stuck on dialup, which gives one more writing
time than reading time.