Because it has been a while, I wanted to check in with the community about the state of the WRM project. For those who were not part of our discussion over the summer or in 2009, the WRM project is a program intended to improve wikiHow by creating “Wiki Raw Material” – good starter articles on topics that we do not yet cover. The goal of the WRM project is to supplement the efforts of volunteers by adding articles that increase our topic breadth and attract new editors and readers with quality articles.The initial WRM test in 2009 included 497 articles that had reached 367,000 readers in a little less than a year. We resumed adding articles through this program last September. Since that time, we have added nearly 2500 WRM articles; in total, WRM articles have reached nearly 2.5 million readers. Under the WRM program, we are doing a good job adding articles on topics that are in areas in which wikiHow has not historically been very strong, and these articles are attracting readers to wikiHow. A few WRM articles have even been improved enough by editors to become FA material:
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http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Certified-Event-Planner
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http://www.wikihow.com/Buy-Gold
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http://www.wikihow.com/Prepare-for-a-Volcanic-Eruption
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http://www.wikihow.com/Stay-Out-of-a-Truck’s-Blind-Spots
Based upon this information, WRM is serving wikiHow’s mission well. We’re adding articles that broaden our content, attract readers, and provide appealing content for the community to develop.
That said, it’s also clear that WRM articles are not always great to start out with. Some of them have needed substantial editing to be truly helpful to readers. Here’s a great example of a community member fixing a WRM article that needed serious help: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Drop-a-Gas-Tank&diff=5437040&oldid=5436046
On the bright side, this edit illustrates the way that WRM and our wiki community complement each other – WRM provided the basics, but BR saw how it needed to be improved.
Moving forward, we are going to be doing a few things to improve WRM’s ability to serve our mission.
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On a test basis, we are hiring someone in Palo Alto who will be responsible for initial quality control on WRM articles. By adding an extra layer of quality control before a WRM article gets published on wikiHow, the raw material that becomes available to wiki editors and readers will be that much better. We’ve hired Katherine Pisana, who has a background in writing, editing and instructional design to fill this role. She will be starting Monday at the wikiHaus. Since the bulk of Katherine’s work will happen before an article gets published on wikiHow, she may not be very active on the wiki itself. Again, this is a test position, if we can find that Katherine can help improve our initial WRM quality, we’ll maintain the position, but if not we will be on to Plan B.
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We are working on new features that will accelerate the process by which wiki editors can find and improve WRM (and non-WRM) articles they are interested in. We’ve already seen that the “Wiki Way + Time + WRM = Great Articles”. We’d now like to figure out how we can make the “Great Articles” part happen faster. We’ve heard from several editors that improving WRM articles can be more enjoyable than reading yet another “How to Kiss Your Justin Bieber Pet Rock while Playing Airsoft” type articles. So tools to help people identify and deep edit on topics they like will make for enjoyable editing, while simultaneously serving our mission.
Sorry for the long winded update! If you have ideas about how WRM can better serve wikiHow’s mission while providing good raw material that wiki editors can work with, please let me know.
It all sounds ok and mission-worthy, but (we know Jack doesn’t like to hire from within the community) I’d rather you had hired Bob whose edit you highlighted.
No one who has read Bob’s articles or seen him on RC Patrol could doubt his skills… but we wouldn’t ask anyone to disrupt his or her life and move here for a job that might not be around in a few months.
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Who the hell is this bob anyway? BTW, that hasn’t crossed my mind, but I did send a resume to WRM, they just haven’t had the good sense to hire me themselves… One thing I have noticed is the way the cite their articles seems to be leaning toward spamming to me, at least to the extent if they are using the cited sources, they are doing so very weakly, except where the copy and paste directly from a source text, which they seem to do occasionally. Oh, and if you want to send an article request my way, I will always be happy to write it free of charge, Chris, but I would think you would know that alweddy… Bob
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I don’t think it’s this one position we’re hinting at. It’s how everything is filled outside of the community with no option of promoting talent from within.
AFAIK, there’s only one Bob around these parts
One of the things I’m hoping that will improve with more QA of WRM is the sourcing – both the quality of the references and how well they are used. I agree that there’s room for improvement with that aspect of the project, and think that we’ll be able to do better with it once we have someone dedicated to scrutiny of WRM quality on board. To the extent that I’m able, I try to make sure that the articles created under WRM are not things where we have a lot of writing done within the community; I try to make sure that WRM is a supplement to community efforts, not something that supplants them. Many of the titles that we are writing are already available on wikiHow via the “Articles for you to write” links at the bottom of article pages, or via the “I want topic suggestions” feature on Write an Article - wikiHow
With a few hundred thousand potentially great how-tos there, there should be a lot of good options for almost anyone. I’m more than happy to pass along topic suggestions when I come across things that I know are in a someone’s wheelhouse, but there’s no doubt I’ll miss a few in the process. If I’m missing the things, and WRM is stepping on anyone’s topics of choice, please let me know – community members’ work is a definite cut above the “Raw Material” articles.
Hiring decisions always pose some challenges, and wikiHow is no exception to that. However, it’s not the case that everything is filled from outside the community. While we don’t hire much - wikiHow still counts its employees in single digits – when a community member has clearly been ready to step into the role, as when Felicity replaced Krystle in FA prep, that’s who moved into that role. In the case of WRM quality assurance, I needed someone who could be in the office with me every day, and who had the flexibility to take on a full-time position with little guarantee about whether there was a long-term future with us. The best choice for that was a qualified local person whose life circumstances and career aspirations allowed that, and whose life wouldn’t be turned upside down if the position ended with little notice. We didn’t have such a person in our community, so we needed to look outside it. But it wasn’t a decision made with the intention of excluding community members.
Sorry for the bump, but I think this is a useful task and I have a request relating to it. I’d like more emphasis on *quality* sources. A few of the WRM articles I’ve seen gave me the impression that they were asked to give a source, but not told to use a reputable one. This applies more broadly, but annoys me most when I see it in medical topics because medical claims: are usually neither obvious or self-documenting (sources are necessary to ensure accuracy), can be and very likely have been rigorously studied and reported on (quality sources are available), have also been reported on by quacks, cranks, frauds, and their marketing agents (unreliable sources are available), can be harmful if false information is acted upon (accuracy matters). Seriously, try to Google “How to [pick any synonym for ‘deal with’] [any medical complaint]” and see what turns up. Often you’ll get one or two decent sites such as NIH and Mayo Clinic, and junk for the rest of the top 10. WRM certainly isn’t the only editor who cites low quality sources - I’ve probably done it myself, though never deliberately. But editing behind a group account makes it harder to look at their other contributions and determine whether they just didn’t evaluate their sources carefully and linked to a quack, or if they are that quack and they’re double dipping by getting paid to promote their own site.
KP, this is a great point, and it’s something Katherine and I are working on. We have sent the writers a large list of “do not use” sites that are not trustworthy sources for their work, and they generally do a good job avoiding these. As you’ve noted, however, excluding this set of large sites that provide unverified content does not preclude writers from using other smaller sites that contain similar sorts of potentially misleading information. Your point about medical topics is a particularly good one – thanks to the sites like those of the CDC, NIH, the Mayo clinic, and others, there is a wealth of excellent health information online that writers can use to create content readers can trust. To address this issue, we are working on training the writers not simply to avoid the sites we’ve listed, but to recognize and avoid using bad references, and are returning for editing articles that are poorly sourced.
Is there a way you could share the list of “Do Not Use” sites with us? Maybe it could be turned into a list of “Sites to Avoid” and we could have another one “Recommended Sites” to help people with researching articles?
I’m worried about making the list public because I think it might be taken as a swipe at other sites, which I don’t think would make wikiHow look very good. The list is based on the guidelines in our article on How to Evaluate the Credibility of a Source
, but if we post the list publicly it might too easily be interpreted as a kind of blacklist or negative statement about other companies, which it’s not. Many of the sites are excellent sources of information, but don’t always make it clear where the information comes from or whether it is complete and accurate. I really like the idea of collaborating on a list of recommended sites, as Nicole suggested though. Perhaps as something that could be linked from How to Use Research Sources on wikiHow
. I think that a list of categorized list of good reference sites would be a big help to editors who want to get some facts for articles they have started or are trying to improve.
We use a bot to publish the articles, but there are real people doing the writing. Bots still aren’t up to doing actual writing. The process is explained more in the old forums
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These WRM starter articles are written by a bot, correct?
