Cleanup Crew (goal: more good edits on wikihow)

Julia2002 November 27, 2020, 10:21pm 1

so i made this so wikihow could get better edits and more cleaned up and correctly formated articles. when joining, it’s possible to get cool rewards and news on your talk page. the link is https://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Cleanup-Crew

Awesome_Aasim November 27, 2020, 10:40pm 2

@Julia2002 : hello, and thanks for your interest in starting a project! We have gotten many ideas for something similar for just “clean up”, but I think the goal is too vague. To quote @anon74718567 from a few months back:

Stormy Weather Project Forum page

Project goals need to encourage people to contribute to the Mission without potentially focusing on removing articles from tools or removing tags before they’re ready. A lot of the project goals that you quote are from projects that have been inactive for several years, prior to the rewrite of our project guidelines.

Some example goals from projects that have made great strides on wikiHow:

Autism Project: Provide helpful, compassionate resources for Autistic people, their loved ones, and concerned citizens of the world; Promote respect for and acceptance of Autistic people; Facilitate the spread of autism-friendly language; Uphold the wishes and dignity of the Autistic community.

Image Reuse Project: To reuse images […] already on wikiHow.

School Made Easy: To improve articles for the average student by expanding stubs and merging duplicate topics. We offer practical advice from students, for students. This includes cramming, procrastinating, writing quick assignments and other essential skills; as well as how to get As, be an honor student or take challenging classes without being stuck.
The project pages themselves may not be major hubs of activity, but they’ve helped quite a bit with making high-quality articles and edits. A goal needs to be clear and specific, without setting numerical goals (which can cause people to prematurely remove tags) or being too broad.

The tools on the Dashboard already all have the underlying goal of getting them out of stormy weather. A user who wants to reduce a Dashboard backlog would do better to participate in a Dashboard tool they like or are good at; they wouldn’t need to join a project or focus on tools they’re not actually interested in. It’s also really hard to make a goal to get a tool out of stormy weather, because whether a tool has reached that point is dependent on how many articles were tagged with certain things, how many unapproved or unanswered questions are going in, how much turnover there is (a lot of new questions come in every day, for example), and so forth. If the goal is just to get tools out of stormy weather, the project is too vague and difficult to determine whether or not it’s actually working.

And to quote myself:

Let's approve more questions.

I think the problem with that project is that there is no rush to crunch backlog. If you focus on everything in “Stormy weather” you may feel pressured to rush, and I know you left a message on the project saying there is no rush. I think a bit of backlog does no harm to the project. The purpose of viewing how much backlog there is is so you can see how long you think it will take. For hundreds of thousands of questions, it may take about two seconds per question. Assuming no loading time, it will take (184092*2)/60/60/2 days assuming you are willing to spend max two hours per day on this backlog, which is almost 60 days. Loading times may bring this number up to almost an entire year. I think it would be best if we just have the backlog be crunched whenever someone feels like it, instead of organizing a project dedicated to just crunching backlog.

If you want the project page that you created deleted, you can maybe ask @anon74718567 or @JayneG for guidance. I appreciate your efforts, though, to try to make wikiHow a better place, but there is no need to make projects on reducing backlogs.

Not to discourage you, but you need a more specific goal

4 Likes

Julia2002 November 28, 2020, 12:56am 3

it’s “make more really good edits”

Awesome_Aasim November 28, 2020, 1:01am 4

Sorry, but that is still too broad. Look at some of our specific projects that @anon74718567 mentioned in that quote. There are even more. Like the Windows project aims to improve Windows-related articles. Or look at one of the projects I started: the Birthday Committee . The goal of that project is to keep users on the site by wishing them happy birthday and happy wikibirthday when it comes around. If you are unable to come up with a specific goal for your project that was not already happening before the project, then I’m afraid that the project may end up closed or deleted.

1 Like

Awesome_Aasim November 28, 2020, 1:09am 5

See also: How to Start a Project on wikiHow: 11 Steps (with Pictures)

1 Like

Awesome_Aasim December 11, 2020, 6:26pm 6

It has been about two weeks now, and a specific goal has not been discussed yet. Awards templates were created and users seemed interested, but this WikiProject still needs a specific goal in order for it to be successful. It also needs a way to track these goals (i.e. by maintaining lists of pages that need to be edited). Note that the first project I started completely failed. If you cannot come up with a specific goal, then you should be prepared to close it.

I am pinging @Julia2002 @ICanSeeItHappening @Snowflakeiesta @BoundlessElise @Spider_Man_No_Way_Ho @ChocoCat1122 to consolidate discussion for this particular project. I do hope that you are able to come up with a specific goal.

At the moment, it seems as if your project is just in phase 1 of development and not quite ready for new recruits. I’d be willing to try and help you get your project, although I am not an expert at WikiProjects, I understand what these projects need in order to be fully successful. It takes more than just recruiting a bunch of community members and slapping together templates, you need to remain focused on your goal for the how-to site.

Since from experience coming up with a good goal can be the hardest part, I’d suggest you start working there. You kind of skipped step 1 and just created a project page right away, but that’s okayBut next time, it would be good to raise your concerns in Collaboration Corner to see if there is anyone actually interested (like “Is anyone interested in cleaning up X articles on wikiHow?”).

Back to the goal, maybe you could focus your cleanup efforts in one topic area. For example, one possible goal could be “I want to make sure that all of our articles in X topic area are helpful, following wikiHow format, and understandable by all readers.” General cleanup is already a WikiGnome task , and starting projects on WikiGnome tasks is a bit unnecessary as seen by the comments I quoted

If you want to just have the project deleted so you can start over, feel free to ping an admin.

2 Likes

ChocoCat1122 December 11, 2020, 7:35pm 7

I’m not the one who made this project, but the goal could be to improve, expand, and cleanup articles to pass quality review, or to remove any tags that might be on the article.

TheSingingAditi December 11, 2020, 8:43pm 8

I’m not a part of this project.

Snowflakeiesta December 12, 2020, 3:36am 9

I didn’t even know that it was just started. I always assumed that this was made long ago and added myself to the group for no reason in particular.

2 Likes

Awesome_Aasim December 12, 2020, 5:13am 10

Remember to check the page history of a project

Spider_Man_No_Way_Ho February 17, 2021, 5:46pm 11

I agree with ChocoCat1122

2 Likes

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