Recently there have been many advertisement articles and many duplicate articles.The fact that newbies are not used to wikiHow is a greater concern as each day someone or the other gets frustrated for being nailed by wikiHow nfd policies. Well I was thinking why no one does anything to stop duplicates and advertisements.Well I have an idea, The idea is to prevent these unnecessary articles by telling the user before hand in the welcome message. We can add something like this: Caution: * On wikiHow advertisement articles don’t get promoted because wikiHow is not a advertisement promoter.( @loiswade
Knows better for she has kept some templates for these advertisement thingy) *If you are planning on writing articles then please make sure the article is not already written by someone on wikiHow by searching for the title in your search bar , otherwise it will be called as duplicate and eventually will get deleted or merged.If the article is already present then you can add up extra points to it which are absent,thereby improving the article. There are certain criterias wherein an article can be nominated for deletion ,to know these please visit {{nfd reasons}} These two simple points will save us lots of quality time and also of our new users and advertisers.This thing will also make sure that their are minimum amount of unnecessary articles(dups,nfds and adv) Seriously Its time to stop all this unnecessary writing and frustration to new users and advertisers due to ignorance. Please feel free to mention pro’s and con’s for the proposal and improve it.
We need to assume good faith with all new users who join wikiHow, and perhaps burdening them with loads of “do that and not this”-type
sentences is definitely not what we want. By the way, quick actions is taken against duplicate and advertisement articles. Yes, some escape from the eyes of our editors, but, others get tagged and appropriate action is taken against them. You can create personal templates to coach a user who is creating NFD|not and NFD|adv articles (like Lois, and many other users do). However, I don’t think we need such an addition to our auto-welcome message. Also, wikiHow is known to be a website with minimal policy. The wikiHow policy page clearly states:_Our approach has been to establish an intentionally minimal number of policies with the intent of clarifying any common misunderstandings_That being said, we do not want to give a harsh or rude- ish
feeling to the new members of our big family
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It’s not necessary to nail newcomers with warnings (even if they’re soft) concerning duplicates and advertisements.
No no no…! …You got it all wrong. By adding these we are reducing the burden and frustration on new users as their articles get deleted one by one.(Its not being harsh but telling them the fact which they should know).Why work afterwords when we can stop it beforehand. Prevention is better then cure!
I don’t know about others, but I personally don’t like being bombarded with rules and policies, especially when I join a website to share (and gain) some knowledge. We give them the link to the wikiHow tour which contains enough details for a new user.
I am not talking about you! not everyone in this world is like you.Adding extra points won’t disappoint anyone instead will avoid the mistakes that have been continuing ever since wikiHow started. Do you think anyone reads that ? Because if anyone read that then no one would have created duplicates in first hand except for anonymous visitors.Since the user is new they tend to contribute quickly rather then reading those long rules stuff as a result dups and adv’s (especially for adv’s there are no rule books).
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This is why the original welcome template was shortened about 99%, even if the original one had links not “rules and policies”… well links to the policies and the like.
That was just a personal opinion of mine, not general (and I believe I have the full right to give a personal opinions in a wiki). Auto-welcome messages
were implemented so they feel welcomed
and can contact an experienced user (admin or NAB) for questions. Also, the new user gets a link to the tour which explains almost everything about wikiHow. Also, our policy page states:
If an user was truly interested in contributing, all he would need is common sense (yes, that is true) and the passion to contribute.
It won’t disappointing anyone but it is not needed (again, my opinion).
Articles go through NABing, RCP, and we even have awesome admins. Most of these articles are dealt with in one of these wikiHow’s defense systems. We have clearly defined policies related to advs and nots (in our deletion policy), and it is up to the user to read them or not. We can leave them some advice and mentor them.
Exactly that’s the point no one wants to read rules and thus get nailed. The points I wrote are quite lengthy because I was trying to explain it to you guys.These points can be shortened to single lines and then added to welcome messages. These 2 serve the basic purpose because a wiki has only two purposes either to write or read and share. Reading has no problem but the duplicate writing and advertisement writing has lots of mess WHICH should be Prevented!
Not when you’re not unsure about whether a disease exists at all. Can you please explain why this is so much more important than every other issue that it should be in the welcome template and everything else (such as, say, civility, not infringing copyrights, or even not writing awful fucking articles
) should not?
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I don’t believe it’s caused catastrophic damage to the site to inform newcomers just as they created their account. Might as well stick every policy, including the new talk page design, chatting courtesy, userpage spam, and other things that one might consider on the same “tiring hassle” as these.
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Because you don’t want good users to get nailed who were actually contributing but a wrong step of not knowing about the policies made them get frustrated for their article was termed duplicate and deleted. And for advertisers they too don’t know about our policies.
“Editing” is taken to be inclusive of writing articles as well as making changes to existing ones, which is why it does not say “however, if you’re going to write
an article, you absolutely need to read all this shit”.
Oh no!!!
Am talking about writing articles
. Yeah one must read all that but no one actually reads that.
Yeah! No wonder there have been so much dups and advs around.
Right. We also don’t want people to copy-and-paste from other websites, or to be rude to other editors, or to write awful stub articles. You still didn’t explain why this is more important
than those things.
You seriously underestimate how awful marketing dickheads are if you believe they’re well-intentioned enough that they will read the advertising policy and not ignore it
.
Because unlike vandals some new users can contribute positively.Vandals come destroy and leave but new users who could be good contributors get frustrated for what ? the thing about which they didn’t new! and leave fucking frustrated.
Some dickheads might understand that they are wasting their time as their writing is going to be deleted anyway.And thus won’t write one in first hand.
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So why not summarize everythingconcerned in this and moreby offering http://www.wikihow.com/Understand-What-wikiHow-Is-Not
link in the welcome message.
IMO I don’t think it’s necessary to update the welcome message. It’s intended as a friendly greeting and users can later on take the wikiHow tour to learn about the site, including what’s and what’s not allowed. Spammers come and go and most new users just want to write their first article with no regards to whether it’s a duplicate or not. I think a better way to handle this is to improve our coaching habits (e.g. explain why it’s being NFD’d and what to do to prevent their next article from being NFD’d). We can also help quicken the NFD process by pitching in in NAB, NFD Guardian, and voting in NFD discussions.
