The past few months I’ve noticed that a lot of articles are being almost copied in another article. The only real differences I see are slight changes in the title. I was thinking about writing an article about journals and that sort of thing, but when I checked for duplicates I found, “How To Keep A Journal” “How To Keep A Journal Book” and “How To Write A Journal” I mean, people see that one article is popular, so they try to get part of that popularity by copying them. I know that our admins work hard to try and monitor this, and I thank them for that, but it’s kind of getting ridiculous. We should try teaching people new things for a change. Instead of just the same thing ten different times.
Yes, I agree. I’m NABing an article right now called “Be a Preppy Popular Girl” but there are already articles called “How to Be a Popular Preppy Girl” or “How to Be a Preppy Girl” or “How to Be a Preppy Teenage Girl” or even “How to Look Preppy”. What I myself am a little confused on is if they could all be combined. Wouldn’t it be easier to have one big article with great information rather than a bunch of little incomplete articles with general information? Could I merge these all into something like “Be a Preppy Popular Girl”? Because I know that it gets annoying @JackC1234
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^^Oops, had something to add. I was thinking to move “Look Preppy” into “Be a Preppy Girl”, because that one has concise steps and information, but on the discussion page, it told me not to move it or merge it because many articles have actually been moved to THAT one. What do you guys think?
I actually edited or patrolled (I can’t remember) those articles, and I think that’s a good idea to move it. If articles had already been merged to it, it would still have their information. So go ahead and do it, but make sure that you change the text enough so that looking something and being something say the same thing.
system
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There are several lines of attack/defense for duplicates. 1 - New Article Boosters can catch, merge or delete them. 2 - Regular users can tag them for merging or deletion when they see them. – http://www.wikihow.com/Category:NFD-(Duplicate)
– http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Merge-Policy
Either way would work. The first if the article is just a copy or adds nothing new to the topic. The second if the topics are the same, but there is new information that can be merged.
system
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You click the “edit” button. Then you put in the “tag”. It usually looks like this (without the spaces) { { N F D | D U P } } for nominating for deletion based on duplication… and { { merge|TitleOfArticleToMergeIntoGoesHere } } for a merge. See http://www.wikihow.com/Merge-a-wikiHow-Article
and http://www.wikihow.com/Nominate-an-Article-for-Deletion-in-wikiHow
for more details.
According to the merge policy, there are many variations of one topic, and these shouldn’t be merged unless necessary. - Specficity (“Cook Chicken” vs. “Roast a Chicken”) - Difference in time (“Organize Your Room” vs. “Organize Your Room in 20 Minutes”) - Difference in demographic/target group like age, gender, etc. (“Get a Boyfriend for Girls” vs. “Get a Boyfriend for Guys” OR “Find a Job” vs. “Find a Job for Preteens”) - Task vs. career (“Sing” vs. “Be a Singer”) For differences in age, specific ages can be merged to one particular milestone, like “Find a Job if You’re 12” can be merged with “Find a Job for Preteens”.
