Anna
1
Now that it’s been a few weeks since we rolled out the MediaWiki upgrade, we just wanted to update everyone on some post-upgrade features - some of these came with the upgrade rollout, and some have been engineered since, thanks to the new MW possibilities. Hopefully they come in handy for editing and wikiWork! New “Flow” ToursWe’ve been working on a few new interactive tour options to help new users find their feet on wikiHow. So far, a Community Dashboard tour has been implemented to activate when a new user creates an account, and a Talk page tour has been added for the first time they check their messages. We’re hoping to implement more in future to help new folks with editing and tools like RCP, too! Thanks to @Jordansmall
for working hard on these!
Category for Citation Errors:The upgrade brought with it some new automatic error messages when there’s something wrong with an article’s citations. Thanks to some help gained from examining Wikipedia’s setup and some template work by @Agent86
and @Argutier
, we now have a handy new category where articles with incorrect citations will go: Pages with incorrect ref formatting
. When an article is edited but the final version includes some kind of citation error (for example, a missing {{reflist}} or a ref tag that’s unclosed or improperly named), the article will end up in there. If you’re ever looking for a “wikiGnome” way to help out, fixing up the errors there would be awesome! And cheers to @Maluniu
and @Byankno1
for helping out with that cleanup already
Key Press Template:One of our editing fellows, @CQinPDX
, who works on a lot of technology-centered articles, got the idea to import the “Key Press Template” from Wikipedia. What this does is actually pretty cool - it allows you to include illustrations of keys from Windows and Mac keyboards, right in your article text. @CQinPDX
is also working on a wikiHow article
to explain how to use the template. It won’t be a necessity by any means, but for those of you who want to use it in articles, it looks pretty neat and helps make the directions extra clear! Thanks to @CQinPDX
and @Colecrane
for making it happen - Look for the templates going live soon! Here’s an example of how it will look:
A Few Post-Upgrade Special Pages: - There’s a page to help with finding particular external links on wikiHow articles (which might come in handy if anyone goes linking crazy and they’re hard to track down): Special:LinkSearch
- Special:ComparePages
offers a pretty neat interface for comparing two different pages (which might be handy for merging). If you include the titles but no revision numbers, it shows you the current versions of each. If you want to compare older versions, use the revision number from the URL (after the words “oldid=”), and it’ll let you compare those, too.
- @Adelaide1230
has found and written a guide
on how to use Special:FileDuplicateSearch
.
So that’s what’s new around here! As always, new features have the potential to work in unexpected ways - so if you try these out and see any problems, let us know! Has anyone else found any neat pages or features of the upgrade they want to share?
Cool! I love the Key Press Templates. That looks so great in the screenshot. Looking forward to trying them out.
Anna
3
Yeah - he’s still testing and ironing out the kinks I think, but here’s an example live: http://www.wikihow.com/Type-a-Dash
system
4
Can’t wait for the Key Press Template; I miss Cipher Nemo’s Template:Key keyboard image insert; and would definitely use this feature in gaming articles (for controller buttons)
Awesome. Love these features!
Shinako
6
Great! I am very excited about the Key Press Template - looks very nice! Kudos to all engineers
Nice! Key Template does look handy. I’ll be able to use that in my latest article.
Jordan
8
I really like these new features, especially the Key Press Template (definitely will come in handy for technical articles and looks great too).
Awesome. I especially like the tours for each newly accessed greenhouse or other activity. A checkbox to make the tours available (even to more experienced users) might be handy too. This partially fills one of my unexpressed “wishes” for the site.
Anna
10
@Serendipitee
- I just checked in with Jordan, you can check out the Tour again on your own pages with: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:CommunityDashboard?tour=dashboard
http://www.wikihow.com/User_talk:Serendipitee?tour=talk
(Insert your name there, if anyone else is trying! After you click that link, you’ll see the tour each time you go to your page - until you hit the “OK” twice to get through it, so just click your way through and it shouldn’t appear again unless you reuse the ?tour=talk link). I love the idea of making those links available at other times - good idea, @Serendipitee
! I’ve worked the Dashboard one into the wikiHow:Tour page. We can also wait and see what other ones are developed in due course and think about offering the links for “redos” somewhere around the site - some may be more important to make available later than others!
Key Press Template looks great! It’ll certainly be very useful for articles that involve instructions that tell you to press keys on Windows or Mac.
Hailey
12
I try using the key press templates too. They look pretty helpful.
@Anna
Talk page tour is a bit too short. Only two “buttons” (should I call them that) that people can read about. Is there more information you can add to give them something else to read about dealing with the Talk page? For the Community Dashboard Tour, why didn’t you explain the other items in “More Things to Try” section?
Anna
15
@Byankno1
We’re aiming to keep it short and sweet for people who just need a little help getting started - long tours get a little overwhelming, it seems: research shows that people don’t tend to see them through. We do have some room to evolve or change it in the future, if we decide that we want different options highlighted, though
Sddek
16
Excellent. Very worthwhile tools. Need to integrate these into my learning curve.
