With wikiHow about to enter its second decade, article quality has been on all our minds, and we all want to help readers find the best advice we have to offer. Most important to this effort, as always, is the tireless work of everyone in the community making articles better, one by one!
On the engineering side, the wikiHaus has been working on a few ways to help improve readers’ and editors’ experiences and make it more clear what articles are still “works in progress” and which are already very helpful resources. So far, part of this plan has involved stubbing
, gathering information from the Rate Tool
, providing Admins and Boosters with a helpfulness widget
containing reader feedback, de-indexing new articles
, and developing the still-evolving Hatchery idea
(where new articles are marked as “not yet approved” until they get through a NAB-style check). The latest step in this process will give readers clearer information about an article’s history and helpfulness (if it has 12 or more votes), up front. It’ll move a snapshot view of the article’s info into a widget in the right-hand sidebar, like this:We’re all excited to see how this helps readers know if they can or can’t trust a specific wikiHow article. For example if an article only has 1 star (indicating that only 1 in 5 people thought it was helpful) , it’s a good sign that the reader shouldn’t rely on the article! Hopefully it’ll help with editing, too, since it’ll put some useful information right at everyone’s fingertips and make it very clear which of our pages need the most help. We will be rolling this on some articles starting this week. If readers seem to find the information helpful we will keep rolling it out. If not, we might pull it back. What do you think, will this be useful source of information for our readers?
Thumbs up from me. It’ll be nice to see how articles I have worked on are being ‘rated’ too.
I love this! Looking forward to seeing these experiments as 2015 approaches…
Ooh, I like this. Does this include ratings from the buttons at the bottom of articles and the new article rating tool on the dashboard?
Looks great! It looks nicer than how it currently is, too.
Glad folks like this idea!
It won’t initially, but this is possible down the road. As of today we don’t have enough data on enough articles from the dashboard tool to do something like this.
Ksisky
7
It seems pretty cool! Maybe you could also make lower star articles appear before others in the greenhouses.
Hailey
8
I think it’s helpful too.
Most Welcome! This is going to be useful in upcoming time, Thanks…
Only more stuff to clog up my already clogged up sidebar(so I can no longer see my Mylinks sidebar without scrolling down of the top view of the page). Any way to turn this feature off?
Anna
11
For the moment it’s a given, Chris, but I know it can be tricky for the most hardcore editors like you, who use a lot of MyLinks. We’ve asked for a preference to be added to the engineering to-do list when it’s feasible. There aren’t any guarantees on that at the moment, but fingers crossed that it might be doable in the long run! Have you ever tried using a footer like @Alabaster
created from his mylinks? I forget exactly how he set it up but I think if you add a footer on your mylinks page, it’ll show up on other pages where your mylinks load. I bet he’d be happy to help you set it up, if you want to use that to get yourself any more linking real estate!
Lojjik
12
@Byankno1
(and anyone else) - As @Anna
said, I will be happy to share the persistent footer code that I am currently using. I find it extremely handy because the links are available on nearly every wikiHow page and always at hand without scrolling the page.
