I’ve been noticing that there’s way
too many articles that say something like “Do (action) Using (product or service)”. I think these should count as advertizing articles, but I wanted to get community consensus before I start tagging them.
It depends on the content of the article. Not every article explaining how to use a specific product should be deleted just because it tells you how to use a specific product. If an article’s clearly an advertisement, then yes, it should be deleted, but not every article with that kind of title is advertising. Always check the content of an article before tagging it for deletion.
Example: “Edit Photos Using Phototweaker.com
” (I don’t even know if that site exists, but I’m just using it as an example). I would consider a title like that to be an advertizement, especially if the site is virtually unknown.
system
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While there is a push to reduce the advertising directed content here, and a discussion about it in another forum thread, we do have a well-defined deletion policy with regard to commercial content. http://www.wikihow.com/Publicize-Yourself-the-Right-Way-on-wikiHow
and http://www.wikihow.com/Write-About-Commercial-Topics-on-wikiHow
offer instructions to readers about creating content about a product or service in compliance with wikiHow’s commercial products guidelines. Since these pages will have predictably low readership, and may offer useful information to readers looking for the information they contain, for the most part they are not harming wikiHow in any way. Spam content, and especially the ‘‘referral link farm’’ content can be deleted as speedy when it is encountered, and spam article content creators can, and have been, blocked to discourage them.
I know about the policy, but I do think that in some ways wikiHow is to lenient and allows sub-standard content to stay. Categories are cluttered with these junk pages, and it doesn’t make us look too professional. I’d only allow articles about services that are very well known (ex. Use Google Drive, Upload Videos to Youtube, Use Twitter, etc).
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@WritingEnthusiast14
There are plenty of services and products that are not well-known (yet), but are very useful to readers, or may provide an alternative method for completing a task. To write off anything that isn’t Google or Twitter or some other huge corporate product or service would close us off and box us in in a way that I think is the exact opposite of the wikiHow mission. “Anything” means anything, not just what you think is popular enough. If the page is truly junk, place a template (or better yet, actually do the work and clean it up, or tag it as NFD for the appropriate reason), voice your opinion on the article’s talk page, and/or just move on and spend your time in a manner you deem more productive. Cleaning up bad pages has nothing to do with whether we would allow “Edit Photos Using Phototweaker.com
” (which, depending on the content as @Lugia2453
indicated, is a fine title as long as it’s a helpful article and not clearly an advertisement). Sometimes, it is hard to determine whether the article is an advertisement or not. That’s where your judgment comes in. Read the article, don’t just look at the title. Does it read like an ad? Even if it does, but could be helpful if reworded, wouldn’t we be better off rewording the article not to be an advertisement, but to be a helpful how-to article? Mass tagging is not the right way to handle these articles.
Well, this thread isn’t going to go anywhere.
system
8
I actually thought all three replies you received here had awesome advice. Is it because it wasn’t the answers you were looking for, disagree with, or something else?
@Maluniu
I do disagree, but this is a community, and I can’t always have my way. However, I do still believe that these articles do not benefit wikiHow at all and all they do is clutter our article lists. On that comment @Isorhythmic
made:
In my opinion, this is similar to justifying the article “Get to My House” because your house may
become a museum one day. Why do we not allow articles such as “Order at Joe’s Restaurant in Cleveland, Ohio” (this restaurant is, presumably, very small), but we do allow articles that tell how to use these websites that only a small amount of people use?
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@WritingEnthusiast14
“Get to My House” would be considered a vanity article. I fail to see the connection. Anyone can search and find any website, big or small, but nobody is ever going to find your house unless you tell them where it is, and it “may become a museum someday” is just wild speculation. This is a logical fallacy/straw man argument. By your argument, you wouldn’t have wanted an article on Twitter in 2006 (the year it was started) because it wasn’t widely used. Now, it is. Then, nobody had heard of it. How do you really know a small amount of people use any website or application? Even if they are, many sites or apps are highly specialized…and they might apply to people with knowledge or skills in one area, but not everyone, including you. To someone who never edits photos, of course you’re going to think that a site you haven’t personally used is not often visited, and you haven’t heard of the sites that someone like @ttrimm
has, who does photos all the time (as an example). Unless you are an expert on everything (nobody is), there are going to be articles, topics, and sites you have little knowledge about or think are useless. Should we delete How to Turn On the TV because it is too obvious? Where do you draw the line? The policies are in place to address these issues, and they do so very well and give specific examples. There may be room for interpretation, and that is fine, but I have an issue with sweeping generalizations like, “these articles do not benefit wikiHow at all,” especially when not one actual article expemlifying these supposed useless characteristics has been given as an example. As has been said before, if the article is an advertisement, nominate it under that reason. If not, don’t, and have some faith that it might be useful to someone who has different skills and interests than you. Anything else is short-sighted and, in my opinion, working againt the mission of wikiHow.
Jack recently mentioned that he did mass merges on commercial articles. You can see the thread here: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/11443/some-bold-merging
. Was he wrong to do this?
system
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If you read the thread, you know the answer to that question already, there was overwhelming support for his effort. The reason? These were duplicates created singly to promote the different services, not articles useful in learning to use them. When a generic title/content is sufficient to make use of a commercial product, the commercially titled article is either a duplicate or needs a valid reason to stand on its own. Making arguments to support your one sided view doesn’t change the reality of wikiHow or the policy regarding commercial topics. If you want honest, forthright responses to your thread, you need to remove the blinders and try to understand there are already sufficient policies and means for dealing with the pages that seem to bother you, and face the reality that those articles are not damning wikiHow, they are simply a part of what wikiHow is.
Hey WE14, Thank you for starting this thread! I appreciate your help in maintaining the quality of wikiHow, and your concern is a valid one. Lugia makes a good point
I would have to agree with her post; you should always check the content of the article, since some articles on how to use a service can be useful, and others can constitute spam/advertising. Thus, not all of them should be deleted, in my humble opinion. Are there specific articles that you’re concerned about? If there are, please provide links and we will look into them as soon as possible. Thanks again for your concern!
@BR
I know what you are saying, and that’s what I’ve meant all along. What I’m saying is, these articles still exist in large numbers, thus cluttering our article lists. After all, we were only recently discussing raising the quality bar even more in light of wikiHow’s tenth anniversary? I believe that this is our opportunity to set stricter standards and improve wikiHow. I know I probably won’t change people’s opinions, because everyone’s mind seems to be made up, but I honestly don’t think that we need these many articles on little websites.
system
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That goes back to the previous thread you brought up, the intention is to shift the deletion/merge policy to get rid of or merge more of these titles. That is a project wikiHaus will invent, manage, and work through in their own time. Since Jack is finally giving a little more leeway with the ‘‘Keep it and see what happens’’ stance he has held in the past, you might expect a move toward getting rid of some of those topics. In the real world, though, if these pages have potential to be useful to even ‘‘those few’’, the community will probably support keeping them. That is the mission of wikiHow, to provide how to articles for every topic. I don’t think we need an article ‘‘How to Spell Exemplify’’ just because Mr. SORhythmic is challenged, but there are articles I hate, personally, but I wouldn’t support deleting…
@WritingEnthusiast14
- Try a thought experiment. Imagine that you have a dial that controls a filter for commercial or advertising content that has a web presence. Imagine that you set the dial way low,– to, say, 50 pageviews per day. That way you get rid of a lot of junk. However, you get rid of some good stuff too, maybe it is fringe material, not that mainstream or well-visited. You have a big problem, though.– What if an article did not make the grade today? What about tomorrow, or the next day, or next week? Haven’t you set up a recursive submission scenario whereby the wikiHow community has to screen the same content time after time and on an ongoing basis? Haven’t you facilitated a page view game that might encourage businesses to pad pageviews by asking friends and neighbors to visit daily. How do you tweak the filter? Daily changes? Do articles float on an off the site based on whether they make the threshold for the ten day running average of their pageviews? What happens if their site goes down for a couple of days? When do you pull their content? Is this what you are talking about?
Lojjik
18
The difference between spam and a legitimate commercial article is the former is trying to get the reader to do something/buy something of theirs. The latter is trying to help the reader solve a problem that they have.
@Alabaster
I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. Can you explain it?
