Help:Article flow

The Article Flow is a helpful tool designed for the Obby Wiki and its contributors to quickly generate a boilerplate article, from where they can edit it and hone the content into a functional article. This page details what the article flow is, how to access it, and how to use it correctly. The article flow was developed specifically for the Obby Wiki, and the information on this page does not apply to other wikis.

What is the Article Flow used for

The Article Flow can fill in boilerplates for multiple types of articles. Currently, the following flows are available:

• Obby (variations: Classic Obby, Difficulty Chart Obby, Tower Obby, Tier Obby)
• User
• Group
• Wiki

Alternatively, you can use it to quickly create a blank article instead.

How to access the Article Flow

The article flow feature is available via the plus button at the top left (next to the menu drawer button). This button is also labelled 'Create a new article' for screen readers. Article flow is available primarily on desktop. While still available on mobile, it is less functional and may run into more issues.

Steps

1. Choose a name

The first step of the article flow is to choose a name. You can choose yourself or from a suggestion of a wanted page. Unless you use the suggestion feature, you will need to press Continue (enter) to proceed to the next step. Before choosing to create a page, it is worth checking whether if it already exists or not.

2. Choose a layout

After choosing a name for your new article, the layout picker will expand. From there, you can choose the layout preset that best matches your page. Certain layouts will already be pre-selected if the system finds a good match (for example, if your article includes 'Obby', you will have the Obby layout preselected). Select a layout and proceed to the next step.

Alternatively, you can choose to create a blank article by selecting no layout. Layouts are also known as flows.

3. Variations

Some layouts (or flows) have alternative variations. For example the Obby layout has multiple, all for specific sub-genres which require different layouts and formats. Sometimes this screen may not appear, depending on which layout you choose. Variations that match your article's name will also be preselected, if applicable.

4. Pre-fetch

Many flows implement automatic fetching, a complicated step where the modal fetches live data from Roblox for you. If your selected layout/flow asks for an ID, you will need to provide one to proceed to the next step.

What ID does it want? The type of ID depends on your selected flow. For example, the obby flow will look for a Roblox root/start place ID, which can typically be extracted from the numeral part of a Roblox game URL (e.g., https://www.roblox.com/games/1818/name).

5. Questions

Some flows have multiple pages of questions to simplify the approach. You can fill out any question provided with a valid answer, and the modal will guide you through what the correct values are.

6. Automatic Uploads

Some flows, such as the Obby flow, have automatic thumbnail/icon uploading capabilities. This allows contributors to effortlessly upload many images for a page relatively quickly, as opposed to manually uploading each individual one. Since the uploads are automatic, the user of the flow will need to verify each image is appropriate, as they are responsible for any images uploaded during their usage of this tool.

Not every flow has automatic uploads enabled. Users will need to skip the step and upload images manually in the event uploading fails.

7. Preview

The final step is to preview the generated wikitext. If this is confusing to you, you can open the visual editor to see it in a visual form. It is worth noting that once you enter the editor you cannot change any answers to your previous questions, but you can edit the page itself.

Click the 'Open Editor' or wikitext button to finish the flow and begin editing your page. Please note that your article will not be published unless you explicitly click 'Save changes', as usual, but any images uploaded during the flow will remain, even if you do not publish the article.