Anna
1
Heya everyone! As you’ve probably heard by now, we’re hoping that wikiHow’s 10th year will be all about quality
. With that goal, the folks at the wikiHaus have been experimenting with new ways to get feedback from readers, like the the new helpfulness/accuracy reporting mechanism (which allows readers to explain their ratings), and the Helpfulness Widget
. It’s all a work in progress, of course, but it’s pretty rad so far – and here’s the next piece to the puzzle! Bebeth has been working hard on a new tool called the Rating Tool. What it does is let you vote on helpfulness for a queue of articles from all over the site. The focus for this is on actual content helpfulness, so the tool blocks out images and other features to have you rate the text.
The results of the ratings then go into the Helpfulness widget (under the Rating Tool header); in the future, assuming the ratings prove as insightful as we hope, we may do much more with these ratings, too - hopefully they’ll inform editing style, when and how we template articles, how we present information for readers, and all sorts, to make wikiHow more helpful. The first step to increasing quality and helpfulness is figuring out where we stand
So, announcements aside - here’s the good stuff! Feel free to try it out and share your thoughts on it. What do you guys think of the idea, and the tool itself? Feedback is always appreciate! http://www.wikihow.com/Special:RateTool
I just tried that new ratings tool. I won’t use that tool that much. I did get discouraged when I used the tool. For me, if an article is unhelpful, I’d rather edit it. Can I suggest adding a “Quick Edit” button to the tool?
Lojjik
4
I think it’s hard to tell if an article is helpful unless you’re the reader who needs to use it. Some things look helpful on the surface, but in actuality are not.
Anna
5
That’s definitely something we’re interested in exploring, Sudo- and a valid concern. That’s why the ratings are reported separately from regular helpfulness ratings, at least during the initial experimental phases. It’ll be interesting to see how the results compare for given articles and could be pretty insightful in identifying unhelpful articles, vs ones that look good but aren’t in practice helpful, vs ones that are great overall. It’s not replacing regular ratings, just adding another layer of data to help with the puzzle
There’s a skip function for the articles we know nothing about. I agree with Byankno1, a quick edit would be a great addition.
system
7
Out of the first 6 articles I came across, 2 of them was youth ones (getting ready for school, etc) and 1 was about a Mac computer (whereas I haven’t used one in nearly 9 years). To stretch @SudoKing
’s comment, to lessen the awkwardness and the number of times a person presses “Skip”, would a category filter (like the NFD Guardian) be doable? As an adult, this is another tool where I’ll be dodging the Youth category completely where rating and helpfulness comes into play, and would probably be more enticing to focus on “adult” relations, such as Family Life, Food, Travel, etc. Just laying out that idea on the table.
I want to see all the kids articles, so I can mercilessly thumbs-down all of those “Be Popular” junk pieces! Hahaha! (Just kidding…) Seriously, though, a filter would be a nice feature to have. I could already see users being asked to vote on topics they know nothing about.
I checked out the tool, and most of the arcticles I don’t know a thing about, but they look promising! :）wikiHow is doing great!
Looks cool! When I look through the articles, I am constantly seeing edits that need to be made so I end up editing them rather than voting!
I agree! A filter for subjects could be good.
This is fantastic. I am always looking for a good link to send to a newbie who asks what they can do. This function is perfect for this, because as a newbie is rating articles with this tool, they are gaining exposure to good articles and bad articles. I like that there is a way to encourage a newbie to read first, rather than to edit right off the bat, or worse, to write a bunch of junk articles.
Nice observation and use of the tool @KnowItSome
!
Anna
13
+1 @KnowItSome
! This is actually one of the reasons I’m most stoked about this tool – I think it’s likely to be a great tool for folks who are hesitant to dive into editing yet. They can help the mission and help get quality issues addressed, even if they’re not confident in all the ways of wikitext yet. I think a category filter or Quick Edit might be a great addition in future, too, but overall I see this tool in a slightly different niche from ones where people do big fixes or expansions in their areas of expertise. It’s more a way to get a big picture on what’s helpful or not, and to highlight which articles may collectively need work (whether overhauls and edits, or templates, or NFDs, or whatever quality-ensuring action is needed!). That info gathering, in combination with ensuing edits from the Greenhouses or other more edit-heavy tools, is how the real magic will happen, I hope
Elocina
15
I agree with @Maluniu
's suggestion of a filter. I just got a Mac article that I don’t know how to assess. In addition, I’m wondering if a discussion button can be added for articles where “yes” or “no” doesn’t fit what I have to say about it. Case in point: [[Care for a Water Balloon]]. It’s probably useful for someone, but it’s also probably something that could cause people to poke fun of wikiHow a la the pet rock articles (particularly the sections which assume your water balloon is a living thing like personality development and health and hygiene). In addition, I think there needs to be a way for a reader to specify what is wrong. When I press “no”, I just get a thanks message, but I think there could be a box where someone writes what they think is wrong or a ink to the discussion page message. New readers may not know about discusssion pages and while they may have a good idea, they may be hesitant to make an edit themselves. So, I think it would be good to give people a chance to comment, even if it’s just a question like “what section needs to be fixed?”. If I don’t know about Macs and all I see is that x% of people agree with the article, that doesn’t necessarily tell me what the problem is or how to act on it.
