Talk:Community Wishlist/Wishes/Build a Wikipedia search that addresses common queries asked by new volunteers

Redundant to already existing features

I strongly believe this technical wish is already granted, but should be furtherly refurbished to make it easier to access in non-major languages of the world. The English Wikipedia has already set Help: namespace with many pages that act like frequently asked questions' pages, for example w:en:Help:Your first article. Thus new implementations of FAQs and newbie programmes are a bit pointless or redundant to already existing systems. Forgot to mention that another way of helping newbies is implementing mentorship program on more wikis (technology already exists, as far as I know it's from 2021), we just need volunteers on local wikis who would be prepared to step in. What we should instead think of is how to improve these help systems and not try to invent something very similar to already existing systems/features, ie. with translating and tweaking help pages to local communities as well as try to make Help: namespace more accessible. Best regards, A09|(pogovor) 08:55, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

I was so happy to find the frequently asked questions like How to edit a page, How to create a new page and other such tutorials, first by browsing my user account page, and then through @A09's suggestions. Thanks @A09. These tutorials are excellent and I am so glad they exist.

The wish I submitted, however, is to surface these tutorial articles from the Wikipedia search results page.

I invite you to think about new volunteer behavior — they will definitely have these frequently asked questions. The design challenge for us is this — what path do new volunteers take to access these helpful tutorial articles? It seems conceivable to me that many new users might type these questions into Wikipedia search, and thus the Wikipedia search results page might be an organic location for new users to receive answers to their frequently asked queries.

As an aside, I fully support @A09's suggestions to implement a "mentorship program" and to make it easier to access tutorials in "non-major languages of the world." These seem like separate and important wishes to me, thus I will look for them in the Wishlist and vote +1 on them. I'd also be super eager to collaborate and help @A09 implement these wishes. WordLunch (talk) 16:26, 28 July 2024 (UTC)

I see what you are trying to convey.

“ The wish I submitted, however, is to surface these tutorial articles from the Wikipedia search results page ”
This is not really feasible per current inner working of Special:Search (example: Vandalism gives an appropriate article instead of the enwiki policy). Some redirects from the main space of enwiki also exist: w:en:How to write an article? redirects to an appropriate page - so it's more about creating such redirects than really modifying Special:Search. An alternative to search tab, and in my honest opinion better and much more scalable version is to make help pages more accessible through ie. special help tabs.

I think I wasn't clear enough in the message above. FAQ technology and mentorship programs already exist, the problem is in smaller wikis which have smaller FAQs and likely no mentorship programs. Instead of inventing new ways we should improve on this problem. I am already a mentor on slwiki however as I am the only one there AFAIK I get no mentorees and the problem of volunteer-mentor shortage is not unique to my homewiki. Thanks for your loving reply and best regards, A09|(pogovor) 18:05, 28 July 2024 (UTC)