Author: villes01

Description:
When starting a new article the wiki should ask the user what kind of an article are they creating and load an appropriate layout. In essence my point is that the MediaWiki:Newpagelayout serves nobody as most if not all wikis have articles of several types.

Consider a wiki about a TV series. They have articles about seasons, episodes and individual characters. That's at least three different layouts. New contributors of the wiki cannot be of any help in creating new articles because they don't know about the {{season}}, {{episode}} and {{character}} templates used. At most they create an article stub which has to be completely rewritten and templated by some experienced user. With multiple new page layouts they would at least stand a chance on creating something useful when the layouts would load the appropriate template and its parameters for them to fill.

My proposed solution is that in addition to the current MediaWiki:Newpagelayout the pages MediaWiki:Newpagelayout# and MediaWiki:Newpagelayouttitle# are deployed. Here, # would be a number from 1 to 9. When creating a new article the wiki would ask: "What kind of an article are you creating? {{:MediaWiki:Newpagelayouttitle1}}, {{:MediaWiki:Newpagelayouttitle2}}, None of these?" The texts would be links which would deploy the associated MediaWiki:Newpagelayout# as the basis for the new article. The last link, "None of the above", would of course use the current default MediaWiki:Newpagelayout. All those links would be loaded only if those special articles existed. If only the regular Newpagelayout existed then there would be nothing to prompt and that layout should be loaded without questions.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement