As most of you know I was on a long wikiHow break. I went off to participate at Citizendium where article writing will take hours if not weeks to research and write. I am not kidding! Here at wikiHow I can usually write an article in a couple hours or less as the research is less involved. One thing I have noticed upon my return to wikiHow is the creation of the Author Leaderboard. While this is a terrific idea to encourage authors to contribute I have noticed one pitfall. It seems the leaderboard could encourage a contributor to write numerous articles that may not be well researched or written. The author is rewarded for not taking the time to a complete article. What I mean by a complete article is this: 1. Research 2. Writing an intro followed up by how to complete the task i.e. Steps 3. Including Tips and Warnings, if needed 4. Including the sources in the Sources and Citations section 5. Adding photos and making sure they are properly sized and inserted 6. Weaving the links 7. Categorizing the article 8. Running a spell check and grammar check using a word processing program, if needed. I use Libre Open Office for example. While I may forget to do one of the above (it’s usually the categorizing for whatever reason) I do try to complete most if not all the tasks given for writing a good wikiHow article. I am not sure what the answer is to this nugget except the Rising Star Leaderboard does help off-set this problem. I’m not sure how to fix this problem, and welcome ideas, as I thought wikiHow was striving to keep those nasty Pandas at bay.
Please share your ideas and thoughts, if you have time. MA
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We’ve actually had those leaderboards around for a long time (well over a year, I believe) and yes, that is a valid concern. But fortunately, we didn’t notice any big decline in article quality from when we launched the leaderboards. There will always be a handful of people who have some sort of preoccupation with increasing their numbers but they always lose interest and leave, or matured and become amazing contributors
That’s one way to look at it I guess. I would love to know a way to encourage quality articles over quantity. It’s very easy to make the story count but not so easy to make the article count when it comes to content. I was gone a long while, over a particular article that was featured, and have returned as it seems that problem is no longer a problem. I am sure WH will figure out a way to solve the quality problem too. MA
