1

Despite the best efforts of a lot of people, we are going to hit 10,000 NABs in the backlog before the week is out, if my guestimate is correct. We are at 9,920 right now.

2

At least it means there are lots of new contributions…

3

Well, yeah. That’s one way of looking at it!

4

If all goes well, I’ll be able to help out with it soon. I took the third part of the test a few days ago, and I’m hoping I did well enough to become an NABer.

5

The multitude of backlogs on the int’l sites are kind of weaning me away. Patrollers can do SOOO much for the boosters just by their quick edits, whether it’s tagging articles NFD if fitted, inquiring copyvio violations (provided you know the procedure), and simple formatting.

6

without a doubt, @Maluniu !!!

7

I agree with Maluniu and Teresa - one reason why NAB is so backlogged are because articles are so hard to boost. But I do agree with Neon Heart, too - that means more great contributions! I’ll be trying to tackle that backlog, every day, by working on the oldest articles. Might not be easy, but I’ll do as much as I can. Hopefully we’ll drive it down before it gets too high:slight_smile:Teresa’s work, as well as the work of the other boosters, is very much appreciated too.

8

It’s not the article difficulty, per se, it’s the article publishing push-out vs. the boosting push-out ratio per day. For example, for the past 21 hours today alone (East Coast time), there was 108 articles published, not including any deletions. All leftover articles from today that weren’t boosted shifts over tomorrow, in addition to tomorrow’s future lineup and thereafter. As wikiHow grows, so does the demands of all jobs. That’s just the way things are, and we, as a community, needs to help each other; hence the patrolling mention. You don’t need to actually be a booster to boost or help on boosting; anything helps, even if an article has already been boosted.

9

I agree that as a community, we must all do our part. Sorry if I sounded conceited.

10

There’s a difference between boosting and clicking ‘mark as patrolled’ on the boost app. Boosters have to physically put their name on a patrol and say that THEY took on the responsibility to boost an article. ‘Non-boosting-boosters’ do not. As much as we like to think that the people who become boosters have the confidence to put their names on this stuff and the time to make something quality, they don’t always. And a lot of boosters are looking to be admins or something like that, therefore they don’t like asking questions that they should about boosts. For these reasons, boosting is very difficult for some. We have a LOT of articles being published, yes, and we don’t have the manpower to do them all. Finding the problem is one thing. Coming with a solution is another. We’re going to get higher and higher traffic as the site grows, and at one point NAB is going to be even more serious of a problem, as helpful as it is to the site.

11

I wrote this in IRC about 6 hours ago to something Teresa mentioned about the boost count: “[15:46] <maluniu> Despite there’s 24 hours in a day, there’s not enough hours to get through the things you need to do on wikiHow :’(”

Anyways, I realize the “stamp of responsibility” on marking articles as patrolled in NAB, but what I’m trying to get at, is if we also encourage people who patrol to do a little bit more than just reverting and looking out for vandalism, there’s your seed right there and at the end of the growth, the mark as patrolled button in NAB itself is like successfully harvesting a great vegetable. </maluniu>

12

I do not feel at all the way @Confusionist describes. I have complete confidence in my ability to boost articles. It is just that there is so much else to do and there is precious little direction on how to proceed with the tasks that are opened up when you become a NAB. If mentors were available one-on-one to fine-tune the boosting effort, I feel that more potential boosters would come aboard. In particular, I asked for input from a booster and got exactly no response:

A short while later, I asked:

Again, I got no answer. And the story was the same with my third question. In my case, I was asking questions of someone who had volunteered to help me and I got no answers to three rounds of questions, so I stopped wasting my time on that front.

13

Who are you asking? Or rather, if you don’t want to answer, come see me.

14

Well, we hit it and even sooner than I thought.

15

Is the overall overall number of articles to be boosted gaining or dropping? I mean, 10k is a lot, but also a lot less than 80k. (I know, I really shouldn’t be the one to talk considering I still haven’t finished the boosting test.)

16

It is definitely growing. a Couple of months ago, it was at 9000. Having to put in more hours at work is REALLY cutting into my boosting time and, unfortunately, I am the one with the thickest boosting skin!!!

17

I’ve been trying to do some boosting today in my spare time, and my observation is that there’s a lot more articles that simply need to be flagged with nfd|dup than there were a few years ago before I took my extended wikiBreak. Also, a lot of articles are by brand new users who really need some attention. The problem is that boosting an article is a relatively long and arduous task. More often then not, it involves completely rewriting an article, sending a note to the author explaining what you did, what policies they broke, and the wiki way. It can take a lot of time to fully tune-up an article and get it up to snuff. Usually, an RC patroller will find a new article before a booster will. What would make life much easier on us boosters would be if the people doing RC patrol will use the Quick Edit tool whenever they find a new article that needs some attention. At the very least, tag it with {{attention}} or a NFD if needed. Also, don’t forget to send a quick note to the editor explaining what you did. That would allow us boosters to really speed up our workflow and try to get through the growing backlog. Every new article has to be boosted - but if boosting takes half the time, we would be back to sunny skies quickly. Also, if you are not a booster and have been using wikiHow for awhile, please consider taking the test and joining the ranks! We need you.

18

The NAB count is literally over 9,000.

19

Gah. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, and have talked a lot about doing a boosting project, but what holds me back from pulling the trigger on that is that I feel like we’d be hacking at the leaves and they would keep growing back faster than we can work (even with the enthusiasm of a project). I worry that might be more discouraging than ever. I really think we need a longer term solution to prevent the backlog from re-growing even if we cut it down. Some ideas I’ve bounced around: -Publishing articles in some kind of drafts namespace, or maybe in the author’s user namespace, until they are approved somehow, maybe through boosting, or some kind of intermediate process. -New article review: A tool that new articles go through where people are asked something like, what does this article need? They can choose from various templates, like copyediting, formatting, or NFD. To avoid people getting too template happy though I’d want to have some kind of coach in place, like RC coach:slight_smile:-Separating booster rights from NFD Guardian access ( @ttrimm ’s idea actually). This would allow more people to use NFD Guardian (and move that backlog) without necessarily having to prove the editing prowess that boosting requires. NFD Guardian really just requires a sound knowledge and consistent application of policy, not “deep editing” abilities.

20

Definitely agree with Anson. It has been very difficult for me to stick with boosting because of all the articles that need a lot of work, but I’ve always tried to be persistent with it and make a few edits here and there. I like the new article review idea a lot! To revise Krystle’s version, we could have a tool entitled Special:NewArticleReview that everyone (except for anonymous users) have access to. People could tag it NFD, merge, or accuracy, but no other templates could be added. The words “Nominate the article for deletion” would appear; below those words, people could select checkboxes such as “hate based or racist”, “incomplete” and “speedy delete” (selecting “speedy delete” would add a speedy tag to the article). This would be used as a last resort, though; the editor who is using this tool should attempt to improve the article. Right below that, we could have the words “Improve the article” and there could be an Edit button right next to that so that non-boosters could edit the article and do the work needed. Once that non-booster feels that he or she has finished doing the work needed, he or she could click on “Send to New Article Boost” (but articles would need to get approved in New Article Review before they go to NAB, to keep there from being too much of a backlog). One does not need to completely fix the article; he or she could just do a small fix on it and the rest of the work could be done in NAB. If someone adds a template other than NFD, merge, or accuracy, the article wouldn’t go to New Article Boost, and he or she bumps into a coach and gets a message on his or her talk page explaining the purpose of the tool. What do you think, @Krystle ?