New project: WikiHow Guardians

Awesome_Aasim December 11, 2020, 6:39pm 4

@ICanSeeItHappening : hello, and thanks for your interest in starting a project! I love that you want to get more people to help out with the site, but I think the goal is too vague. To quote @anon74718567 from a few months back:

Stormy Weather Project Forum page

Project goals need to encourage people to contribute to the Mission without potentially focusing on removing articles from tools or removing tags before they’re ready. A lot of the project goals that you quote are from projects that have been inactive for several years, prior to the rewrite of our project guidelines.

Some example goals from projects that have made great strides on wikiHow:

Autism Project: Provide helpful, compassionate resources for Autistic people, their loved ones, and concerned citizens of the world; Promote respect for and acceptance of Autistic people; Facilitate the spread of autism-friendly language; Uphold the wishes and dignity of the Autistic community.

Image Reuse Project: To reuse images […] already on wikiHow.

School Made Easy: To improve articles for the average student by expanding stubs and merging duplicate topics. We offer practical advice from students, for students. This includes cramming, procrastinating, writing quick assignments and other essential skills; as well as how to get As, be an honor student or take challenging classes without being stuck.
The project pages themselves may not be major hubs of activity, but they’ve helped quite a bit with making high-quality articles and edits. A goal needs to be clear and specific, without setting numerical goals (which can cause people to prematurely remove tags) or being too broad.

The tools on the Dashboard already all have the underlying goal of getting them out of stormy weather. A user who wants to reduce a Dashboard backlog would do better to participate in a Dashboard tool they like or are good at; they wouldn’t need to join a project or focus on tools they’re not actually interested in. It’s also really hard to make a goal to get a tool out of stormy weather, because whether a tool has reached that point is dependent on how many articles were tagged with certain things, how many unapproved or unanswered questions are going in, how much turnover there is (a lot of new questions come in every day, for example), and so forth. If the goal is just to get tools out of stormy weather, the project is too vague and difficult to determine whether or not it’s actually working.

And to quote myself:

Let's approve more questions.

I think the problem with that project is that there is no rush to crunch backlog. If you focus on everything in “Stormy weather” you may feel pressured to rush, and I know you left a message on the project saying there is no rush. I think a bit of backlog does no harm to the project. The purpose of viewing how much backlog there is is so you can see how long you think it will take. For hundreds of thousands of questions, it may take about two seconds per question. Assuming no loading time, it will take (184092*2)/60/60/2 days assuming you are willing to spend max two hours per day on this backlog, which is almost 60 days. Loading times may bring this number up to almost an entire year. I think it would be best if we just have the backlog be crunched whenever someone feels like it, instead of organizing a project dedicated to just crunching backlog.

If you want the project page that you created deleted, you can maybe ask @anon74718567 or @JayneG for guidance. I appreciate your efforts, though, to try to make wikiHow a better place, but there is no need to make projects on reducing backlogs.

Not to discourage you, but you need a more specific goal

You may also want to look at How to Start a Project on wikiHow: 11 Steps (with Pictures) .

I think it would be best to start by discussing the project idea on the forums first then create a project page if you get enough interested members.

4 Likes

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