Everybody gets bad press once in a while. Some people even say, you’re not doing it right unless you’re getting burned and trolled from every which direction
. In case you haven’t seen
, Gawker Media’s women interests blog poked at wikiHow’s guides to being one type of girl or another. Several links to wikiHow’s rather sad-looking articles on “transforming yourself” into one stereotype or another are included, and the comments section is going pretty wild. One commentator sums it all up (and my brain after reading How to Be a California Girl) with this:We’ve established for a long time
that wikiHow’s youth category is in pathetic shape, especially the “personality types” subcat. I know I’m guilty of pushing it off for things that can keep me a bit more sane, like using sandpaper in place of Cottonelle and firing semi-automatic weapons at my foot. But, something needs to be done to clean up the youth category. It’s been several years now that the youth cat has been “nehhh needs help but don’t want to do”, and I think this Jezebel article is a decent reminder that we actually need to do something about this. What is this “something”? Damned if I knew. Feel free to drop in any and all ideas.
We have been through this loop for years ----- and there’s many old-timers that can agree. (And yes, we need to do something about the random 1K something Club Penguin articles before we get repped for that as well).
I’ve said it already elsewhere, but “there is awful stuff on wikiHow” is the blog equivalent of the “Twitter users react to…” stories I see on mainstream media sites from time to time. Which is to say: You gotta do what you gotta to to meet a deadline when there’s hamsters to feed. Of course the youth category needs fixing, as it always has
. “A blog said mean things about wikiHow” is about the least good reason to do that. Meanwhile:
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What an article, she doesn’t relize that we have thousands of high-quality articles that have been worked on and read by millions of people. We can’t delete the teen section, that would make us look…You know, however, it needs to be high-quality. Lewis pointed out earlier in IRC, that this makes us look like we’re sitting on a pile of ****** articles - Which people like the author of the article, make us look like, but part of that is, I’m sad to say, true. Fortunetly, we’ve got our Boosters, and other good authors, such as Lewis and Love2, and then, even newer users, like Garang.Prasad and etc… We need those people (Not them specifecly) to help fix up the articles, like we’ve been doing, only get it out there more. I say, I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve patrolled about getting a date.
They should be narrowed down, somehow … June Days
Someone that can work on ‘projects’ and stay focused (and has pretty thick skin) is what it is going to take. I can do all that, but I am staying with NAB until it’s down.
^ I could do that, but I mostly patrol now - I wouldn’t know how to start. If anyone wants to co-work on this, I’d love to help, but it would have to be a few people. I’m wondering about IZ, she’d be good at this, since she’s one, a teen, two, is serious when needed, three, thick skinned and four, an Admin who could narrow down and delete articles. June Days
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Teresa - THANK YOU! You’re AMAZING in NAB and I’d hate to lose your expertise there just to clean up the Youth Cat. (lol… will the youth “cat” become the youth “dog”?)
^ Wait, isn’t cat category???
Ttrimm
9
Yes it is. She was being witty (funny).
It is? I read it as in the animal, thinking “This is an odd time for a metaphor, but I’ll just ignore it.”
Oh. Reguarding your FB post, I am on the…Not smarter side. Off track, anyway, who. wants to help clean this area up with me? If I had my way, a lot of the articles would be deleted, the nonsense ones, to make way for…Better written ones. June Days
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Hmm… I *could* do it but just don’t know how much time I could devote specifically to that project. I can definitely help out with deleting and editing articles though- if someone could get me the links and we could start going through the articles . . .
^ I’ll be working to get this category cleaned up. IZ, I’ll be devoting my time on this, if you help delete and edit. I’ll edit and help with seeing that this little *project* is taken care of. June Days
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Okay, I’ll see what I can do when I can do it then.
Just relized I have my work cut out for me. O_O
Are you planning to bypass the NFD process?
No? I would ask her opinion on NFDing and if there are any speedys or such. Nope, it’s a policy, and everyone has to abide by it. June Days
If people are going to say bad things about wikiHow, they obviously have not taken the time to really see the good of wikiHow. Until they take the 5 seconds to sign up, maybe we should block the viewing of these low-quality articles? Sent from my Nintendo 3DS
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^ That’s an interesting thought, but it does seem kinda sneaky in my opinion?
^ Was thinking along the lines of what Jill (May I call you that? =)) said, they are just people who are bumping a great site, however, those don’t pop up like that, they took time to find out bad articles. At least they know we have awesome articles mixed in with the bad ones…I’ll be sending some links to IZ to help fix up, anyone else wanna help? June Days
