Help:How to create an article
In Abstract Wikipedia you can only create articles about topics that already have a Wikidata item. If the topic does not already exist on Wikidata that you can tell by search, follow this help page to make a new item for it.
Steps
[edit]In order to create an article, you can go to Create a New Abstract Article.
Type to select a topic, and click on create.
You will get to a new screen. On the right hand side you see the preview in the selected language, on the left hand side the abstract content.
Click on the plus button in the left panel to add a new fragment. For now, we are adding an empty fragment.
This will look like this, showing a function call without a function selected yet. We click on the caron next to the red "Select Function" text.
That will open the function selector.
We select a function. It has to be a function that exists on Wikifunctions, and at this point, it has to return an HTML fragment. In this example we choose the function "string to HTML fragment", as this allows us to enter a string, or choose a function that creates a string.
We have now selected a function. We get fields for the arguments. Instead of typing a string, we want to add another function,
In order to do so, we change the mode of the argument named string by clicking on the three dots next to string. This allows us to change from the current mode, literal, to a function call.
Here we can now select a function that returns a string.
We select the function "Article-less instantiating fragment" -- a function that creates sentences such as "Paris is a city." Note that selecting the function “Article-less instantiating HTML fragment” would have allowed us to skip using the function “string to HTML fragment”.
Now we see the arguments for this function. We also get automatically fitting arguments filled in. This leads to the sentence "Paris is a Paris.", because the arguments "entity" and "class" both get prefilled with the item we are writing about.
We need to change the mode on the "class" argument from the automatically filled value (an Argument reference) to a literal.
This gives us now a field to select a Wikidata item for the value of the "class" argument.
We select the "city" item for the class argument.
Once this is selected, the first sentence of the article should be ready. We can now click on publish and have a first version of the article available. Now you can click edit to add more.
This is far too complicated!
[edit]Yes, agreed.
There are two ways to make this easier:
- improve the UX
- improve the catalogue of functions
Whereas the development team at the Wikimedia Foundation will be focused on the first approach (and will always appreciate UX ideas), the community can work on a more comprehensive and easy to use catalogue of functions in Wikifunctions. Here we see that naming the functions and arguments is important, and that we probably want to avoid too many functions which turn one type in another in the above flow.
But yes, most importantly, Abstract Wikipedia is currently in an early public Beta, and it is currently difficult to create and edit articles. We all will need to work together to improve that. If you have ideas for new functions, please suggest them at Suggested functions.