This is the official forum thread for the WikiOne Project
. Our goal is to get all the scattered articles on a topic and combine them into one good, comprehensive article. While it will inevitably take years, wikiHow will be drastically improved when finished. Feel free to ask post any questions, comments, or suggestions here. Thanks!
We already have a project on that, as Chris outlined on your talk page: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Merge-Project
I am sure there are a lot of topics that would benefit from this, but there are also a lot of topics that may be better left in individual articles, if I am understanding this correctly. The idea of making a comprehensive article about a broad topic like Minecraft could end up with dozens of subheadings, and hundreds of steps if you take the task far enough. With other article topics, say Painting Nails, there are unique pages for Zebra Stripes, Newspaper Nails, Stars, Rainbows, etc… it is hard to imagine combining them into a comprehensive single page. The same would apply to a topic like Cooking Chicken… we wouldn’t want to combine Southern Fry Chicken with Barbecue Chicken and Roast Chicken, would we? That brings me to the point of this post, how do we decide which “scattered articles” would (or should) be combined?
I don’t think all the “scattered articles on a topic” should be combined into one “good, comprehensive article.” This is why we have categories. I think the goal of a project like this should be to identify articles that currently have merge tags that are nearly similar titles and go ahead and merge those, which is what the Merge Team tries to accomplish, or identify titles that should
have the merge tag and go ahead and merge those. This cuts down on duplicate information and titles, but does not compromise the advantage of having different articles dealing with different aspects of a topic.
@BR
I’ll give an example. There are just way too many articles on the same topic in the Bedroom Cleaning section. A bunch of articles are titled “Clean and Organize Your Room”, or something along those lines. They need to be combined into one article about Cleaning and Organizing your room. However, they would not be merged into “Clean Your Room”, because organizing and cleaning are two different topics. On your example about chicken, that would not count, because those are different topics. I mean interchangeable articles that are spread around. @Adelaide
The way my project will differ is all the members will communicate on this forum thread, instead of joining a team and everyone kind of going their own separate ways. It will even be complete with a bi-weekly newsletter, which will show the progress made in that period of time. Also, as far as I know, the Merge Team only merges the articles in the Merge category, while this team will actually search for untagged articles that need to be merged. I know that I could be wrong, but I think that this team differs slightly from the Merge Team.
Well on the surface, Cleaning a Room and Organizing a Room are two separate topics, and whether a duplicate title is in the merge category or not doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be merged, it only means it hasn’t been processed correctly. With over 150,000 titles, there is a potentially huge number of possible merges that could be made, and that isn’t even counting all of WRM’s duplicated garbage dump of pages. I just don’t recognize a distinction.
I can see everyone’s point, so I cleared the project page and all related content. Can someone delete the project page? After that’s done, I ask that this thread be closed and bumped. I’ll just go back to my more casual thread. Thanks!
I don’t recognize a distinction either between the projects, and I agree that there is a potentially huge number of possible merges that need to take place, both already tagged and not already tagged. Just because they aren’t tagged doesn’t mean that someone from the merge team (or any other editor) can’t go ahead and merge them. In the future, a prudent approach might be to seek out existing projects (in this case the Merge Team/Merge Project) and either join or create a new energy or excitement around it. If we get into having duplicate projects/teams, as well as all the duplicate articles, well, we all understand how that dilutes quality and fragments the energy needed to complete the task.
