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This is a bit unrelated to wikiHow.

I would like to start that humor belongs on Uncyclopedia, not wikiHow.

With that in mind, some articles get NFD’d as a joke. I think we should definitely save a local copy to wikiHow: space so us wikiHow contributors can enjoy some of the joke articles.

If I am not wrong, all Project: pages are deindexed and hidden to readers by default, except for a few project pages related to policy and administration. That means we can have our joke articles preserved in Project: space for us contributors to enjoy.

We get so many joke articles like https://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Turn-Yourself-Into-a-Chicken&redlink=1 . Why can’t we just have a project for this?

Few conditions for project:

  1. The title in any way must not be mean.
  2. The article has to actually be funny and not just stupid .
  3. The article contents have to be clean.
  4. The instructions cannot contain patent nonsense (like aaaaaaaaaaaa or wefweofijwefoijf)
  5. The article must not have been written in blatantviolation of existing policies.
  6. When possible, joke articles by established contributors should be written in userspace and then later moved by a booster participating in the project if they find the joke page funny.

This does not directly improve wikiHow, but it does provide wikiHowians an incentive to come and actually make positive contributions. We can maybe even scavenge already deleted joke pages. Maybe we can even transform some of these joke pages into useful how-tos that readers can enjoy! Like “Become a VSCO Girl” was written as a joke many times. After some time, WRM started the title “Be a VSCO Girl” and it blew up! I know there was the wikiHowl project a few years back, but that failed. We have forum games about joke articles and general chat about joke pages, and @RubyRoseRain has saved some joke pages to her userspace. Maybe we put this idea into practice here!

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If we’re going to do this, then why not make a “Joke:” namespace just for these types of articles.

Also, we could probably make a special section of the site for this that is accessible to logged out readers. Readers who just want to laugh, and are not looking for legit instructions would probably enjoy such articles. I would imagine that the joke articles would be quite popular. It would also probably be possible to put some ads on these joke pages for extra money. It might be worth testing out something like this. At least it would put the joke articles, that we already get quite often, to some use.

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@Awesome_Aasim Maybe you’d be interested in this ?:slight_smile:

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@HelperOnWikihow the issue with that site is that all contributions on wikiHow are CC BY-NC-SA unless if someone licenses them otherwise (like I licensed my contributions under CC BY-SA). Fandom runs ads on most of their wikis, which would be a violation of our content license. Uncyclopedia would work because Uncyclopedia’s CC BY-NC-SA content license is compatible with ours. Plus, they don’t run ads. But I think like I said, we can just put them in project: space. Whether they are public or not maybe the staff can decide.

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I will say, that even though I have contributed to the wikiHowl FANDOM wiki, I have looked through the Creative Commons license that wikiHow uses, and it is actually a copyright violation to copy articles posted on wikiHow to FANDOM. If one of the original article writers submitted a DMCA take down to FANDOM, that wiki would be deleted very quickly.

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Yep, we said the same thing! LOL.

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One min… I am starting a draft project page atm. Then we can consolidate all of our joke pages into a bunch of subpages.

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Well either way, I’m one for saving the article in your userspace. Not that I dislike the idea, but…

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I started a draft at https://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=wikiHow:WikiHowl . How does it look? We all need a little bit of humor in our life:slight_smile:

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Wouldn’t this just make us look like a joke site, though? You’d be surprised at what trolls are able to find on the site, and it’s really hard to point to the Deletion Policy if they can just point back to us saving these articles as a rebuttal.

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Yes that is true, though, like I said, this project is for joke pages that are actually funny. Most of the joke pages that are tagged for {{nfd|jok}} aren’t really funny. Like https://www.wikihow.com/User:Awesome-Aasim/LOL/Age is actually funny, not the kind of article that falls on the lines of stupid IMHO. That is why I saved it to userspace.

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Basically, it is up to the community to decide what kind of humor is actually funny and what is just plain stupid.

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Trolls say and point at a lot of things just to troll. It’s not that hard to deal with them if you stick to the policy.

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I see what you’re saying, but as an admin, we’re the ones who have to deal with them if they won’t listen to other users or if more inexperienced users don’t know what to do. It’s really hard to justify it if we’re hanging onto silly articles, because they can just argue back “well, why don’t you just keep mine instead?” Or a particularly clever troll could make it in the wikiHow: namespace, and if it accidentally gets patrolled we might not even see it until months or years down the line.

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On a side note, related to the FANDOM project you started, you can have the wiki closed by visiting https://fandom.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360000931354 and choosing “Please close the wiki”. The URL for the wiki is https://wikihowl.fandom.com/ . Pinging @Murmansk_Hills and @HelperOnWikihow as they are sysops on the wikihowl FANDOM.

You can just say that “I previously contributed to wikiHow and was unaware of their licensing policy that prohibits commercial use, to avoid legal trouble, I want this wiki closed right now.” Hopefully FANDOM staff actually look at the request and close the wiki. If that does not work, then at least our staff can send a DMCA request to FANDOM.

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I deal with trolls all the time too. I’ve never had any real issues with them. They’re pretty easy to frustrate if you just use templates and stay kind. Also, edits to main articles could also be accidentally patrolled, and cause a lot more issues. If a bad wikiHow: namespace page gets patrolled accidentally, then it’s not a big deal. Anonymous readers can’t see those pages anyways.

I think that there is no harm in trying this. If it does go bad, then it can be stopped and deleted. But if we don’t do it, then we could miss out on a cool idea.

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“Particularly clever” - has enough knowledge to know that we are running MediaWiki as well and can just seek out the MediaWiki edit forms by just adding stuff to the URL.

Most trolls (and other editors) have not contributed to Wikipedia or another MediaWiki wiki. And those that have, well, end up having their IPs blocked on that wiki as well. At least we can give this a shot (1 month trial). If such a particularly clever troll does come around and create a page in Project: namespace, we can end the trial and delete the project. If this happens after the one month trial, then we can consider whether we need to move the project elsewhere (like to a different wiki).

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But you can argue it would confuse new good-faith users too, right? Think about how confusing it was for users who saw the “Your Most Common Questions Answered” articles or the more recent sex articles by WRM - those articles were tests, but even long-term volunteers didn’t know that right off the bat. All I could really see this doing is confusing good-faith users on nfd|jok and serving as a catalyst for trolls trying to bicker their cases on why we should retain their joke articles. I just don’t see a need to allow that problem to even exist… We already had a reputation as a joke site for awhile and now that staff’s putting in so much effort to help us shake that, this just seems like the complete opposite of how they’d want us to be viewed.

If there’s something you really, truly want to keep, you can just put it in your User namespace or copy it into a Google Doc. Keeping it on the site just leads to confusion. (Not to mention I think the wikiHow: namespace actually is accessible to logged-out users? At least to some degree. I know a good chunk of the “professional” pages, like the one on delivering a trustworthy experience, are in the wikiHow: namespace.)

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You could put messages on top of joke articles that make it more clear. And as for the joke site thing, I remember that Jake Herrick did an interview with The Atlantic, and he said that he loved the memes, and that he was happy that some of the most funny and creative people on the internet were talking about wikiHow, and I think that that is a generally good concept. If these joke articles get more funny and clever people talking about wikiHow, or having fun, then I think that is a good thing.

And as for saving the articles. If I save them, nobody else can read them. I think that sharing them with others is important and could be good.

Again, I think that trying this out is a good idea, and it can always be canceled if it does not work out.

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I just tested one of the pages I created. It is indeed hidden to logged out users. The only pages publicly visible to everyone are wikiHow:Terms of Use, wikiHow:Privacy Policy, wikiHow:Adminstrator Notice Board, most the policy pages, and other pages that are on the “ whitelisted pages ” as documented on MediaWiki.org . This also means that for the most part, other pages are completely invisible. That would also mean that “joke” pages put in wikiHow space are also hidden.

And like I said, 90% of {{nfd|jok}} pages are actually not funny. The titles are a joke, but the content is not funny. Those should just be plain deleted nonetheless. Only 10% actually are funny. That is why we are here to document the 10% that are actually funny. I know we may be split on this issue, but as far as I know, the deletion policy applies to articles , not to pages in other namespaces. All other pages are deleted with admin discretion.