swalling wrote:

(In reply to Sumana Harihareswara from comment #0)

When a person wants to create a new Draft article (on English Wikipedia),
they generally want to include the

{{Draft article}}

template. Can we make it so that hitting the "create a new page" link in
that namespace automatically adds the template?

(Also feel free to tell me if this should actually go on the English
Wikipedia Village Pump:Technical.)

Rather than prescribe a specific solution using templates, I would like to assess the core use case and design from the beginning. We might express these user stories like the following:

• As a reader, I need to easily know what is and isn't a draft, so that I know what to trust on Wikipedia.
• An an editor, I need to easily know what is and isn't a draft, so that I know whether it has been published or not.

Keep in mind that drafts are not indexed by external search engines and shouldn't be included in the default search on site either. So anyone looking for a draft right now has to been intentionally searching for

In terms of the actual implementation, there are some negative sides to using a template. It is actually a bit unusual to drop a template automatically in a page, and is not really reliable. New users can edit the contents to accidentally or intentionally remove the template. This opens up an easy mistake for newbies to make, and then get yelled at for with some kind of warning or bot-delivered message.

Instead, I think we should just build extra draft indicators in to the design of the namespace. We did a design exploration for this already and iterated based on community feedback. See it at [[:commons:File:Draft indicator for reading mode v2.pdf]] This is not that hard to do.

sumanah wrote:

Steven, you are totally right. Thank you and thanks to the team for already thinking through this so thoroughly! If I want to follow up further on this sort of thing, should I talk at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Draft_namespace ?