Yes i am shortly back from my wikibreak and I have noticed alarming amounts of chatting. I had 2 or 3 messages alone asking for personal info or something non-wiki related, i was horrified because 1 I don’t edit often So people would have had to search me 2 searching those people means no time for editing. 3 People didn’t realize i was on my wikibreak I see lots of people just sending messages back and forth without making any edits. This is a little excsessive and i think we could use a rule where people could be blocked for a hour or so, yes we already have it but we don’t use it as often as i think is nesecary. Just some 2 pennies. Grahamster00 Visit this link for more info http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/4418/why-are-you-active-in-the-forums-user-pages-talk-pages-but-not-doing-wikiwork/#Item_33
I’ve gotten used to it - chatting as though this is a social network is one of the downsides to the site being so famous.
Steve5
3
I noticed that also about the chatting and blank edits when I did some patrolling recently. I didn’t mark them as patrolled.
I think the fact that it’s summer and people are out of school changes editing habits, combined with the increased amount of visitors to wikiHow. Did you check to see if these people had gotten any welcome messages from you via the automatic welcome tool (I forget how those are generated)?
Jordan
5
^ This. The back-and-forth talk page chatting should quiet down a bit once the school year starts up.
+1 I’m sure that there are loads of users who are sitting around all day during the summer doing nothing, so they decide “hey, I’m bored, I’ll check out this wikiHow website”. Once school and their activities start up, unless they became really devoted to wikiHow, I doubt they’ll have the time or the need to endlessly chat here.
Yes, people who don’t edit and search for me specifically creep me out
Also I would like to discuss the second message a user gets is one in Bright Orange letters asking if they would like their talk page designed. Why do we have colored talk pages? Just so that things look “Sparkly and cool”? I had mine changed to black and white because, good god, yellow on neon orange makes it inpossible to type.
Some people like to express themselves. I don’t really do anything with mine, and I don’t mind when people do it, except when they have junk everywhere, and put awful colors together.
As stated above, people design their user/talkpages as a way to express themselves, although lately a lot of people have been becoming “obsessed” with it, and changing their user/talkpage designs more often then doing any actual wikiWork, which is becoming a bit of an issue. There have also been a lot of userpage designers leaving messages to virtually every user asking them if they want their talkpage designed, which creates a lot of work for those in RC Patrol. I think it’s great that talk and user pages allow you to express yourself, but it should be done tastefully (ie. no neon fonts on neon backgrounds… it seriously kills everyone’s eyes), and people need to remember that the goal of wikiHow isn’t who can have the coolest userpage, it’s about creating the world’s largest high quality how-to manual.
You know that speech bubble at the top of every page? What if we made it link to some of these threads? It might be a bit forceful, but it’d probably help a bit, since the main reason there are so many people obsesively designing user/talk pages is because those people are uneducated on how it affects wikiHow.
system
13
Please, why patrol all this? You allow articles that, to be kind, are objectionable enough; are you that worried a cuss-word might slip through or something? How many are there? 20? 50? Write a bot, already.
You really were horrified by people chatting on your talk page?
