1

I have had this idea for a bit. I am not sure if this is already being done on the site, but I had this thought. What if we compiled different how-to articles on a topic into guides? I am throwing this idea out for a few reasons:

  1. Category requests are on hold. We have too many categories, and we do not need categories on every single video game or every single program. Guides allow for the organization of articles without the need for categories, or they could accompany categorization.
  2. Different people have different progress towards a more complicated set of tasks. For example, not everyone that is playing chess is good at chess. Some people are just starting out, while others want to know how to play at a professional level.
  3. Organization. With categories, the most that you can organize is by topic. This is not necessarily the most helpful. Guides could be organized more like a book and less like a big collection of pages.
  4. Progress. If we do not have an article on a specific topic, we could both 1) have red links as part of the workflow for a guide and 2) hide the guide temporarily until it is all ready. We can also use the guide internally using HTML comments and track projects using what we have in our guide as a reference.

Completed guides could even become books laying on shelves. Partially completed guides can still help readers, we just need to have it that maintenance tags are hidden. Also would be good to restrict editing of guides to autoconfirmed users so that IPs and new users do not get confused and cannot mess with the layout of a guide.

Here is what a guide might look like (using a game I am currently playing right now as an example, with links to relevant articles and of course complete with the tiles that we see in categories):

Guide: Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact (原神) is a free-to-play action role-playing game in which a traveler ends up in Teyvat after having their sibling be kidnapped by an unknown god. Want to improve your adventure/combat skills? Look no further than this guide. Get started, defeat some enemies, unlock more characters and play with friends as you progress through the storyline of the Breath of the Wild -inspired adventure game.

The Basics

  • Getting Started
  • Cook Food in Genshin Impact
  • Unlock Chests in Genshin Impact
  • Teleport in Genshin Impact
  • Increase Your Adventure Rank

Combat

  • Combining Elements
  • Selecting Weapons
  • Choosing Artifacts

Fighting Enemies

  • Defeat a Ruin Guard
  • Defeat a Ruin Hunter
  • Defeat a Mitachurl
  • Defeat an Eye of the Storm
  • Defeat a Stonehide Lawachurl
    …

Fighting Normal Bosses

  • Defeat an Anemo Hypostasis
  • Defeat an Electro Hypostasis
  • Defeat a Geo Hypostasis
  • Defeat a Pyro Regisvine
  • Defeat a Cryo Regisvine
  • Defeat an Oceanid

Challenging Weekly Bosses

  • Confront Stormterror
  • Challenge the Wolf of the North
  • Enter the Golden House

Domains

  • Unlock Cecilia Garden
  • Unlock Taishan Mansion
  • Play the Spiral Abyss

Characters

  • Get More Characters
  • Build a Character
  • Use the Wish System
  • Enhance Weapons
  • Enhance Artifacts
  • Unlock Constellations

Advanced

  • Play in Co-op Mode
  • Purchase Top-up Crystals
  • Change the Voice Over Language

Troubleshooting

  • Reinstalling
  • Fix Performance Issues
  • Change Launch Settings
  • Reset Your Password
  • Update the Game
  • Contact miHoYo

We could use the NAB system to decide when guides are ready to be public as well. I have not included links in my above example, but there would be appropriate blue/green links to other wikiHow articles in this list. Topics not covered yet would be commented out until someone starts an article on that topic. Maybe we could even feature guides on the front page.

4 Likes
2

I’m not even entirely clear on what the idea is here, but I’ll respond based on what I do understand.

I think staff already tried something like this a couple of years ago by making “toolkits” and it didn’t really go over so well? I don’t know whether it actually fared badly with readers, but I know we haven’t had any more since the initial tests. And there are a lot of topics in which this wouldn’t work or the order would be unclear (The Sims or learning to play instruments, for example). So I’m not sure this idea would take off.

3

The idea is compiling how-to articles for a specific topic into different guides, like this. I know we have something that is very broad, like wikiHow:Tech Help - wikiHow , but it is, well, broad. That page is not exactly a guide as the topic is too broad. A guide could list pages pertaining to a topic in particular order, probably in order of difficulty, so for something like chess, playing your first game would be near the top, using different tactics would be further down, checkmating an opponent could be even further down, and playing chess at an advanced level could be near the end. I see guides as a useful measure to track progress, as once someone is more advanced in chess, they will need not refer to the beginning anymore, but to later in the end.

I also think this would only be good for some topics. Like setting up your PC could be near the top, using certain features could be even lower, and troubleshooting your PC could be near the bottom. As I also said, we could use the NAB system to promote/demote guides when they are ready/not ready.

Also, a guide is supposed to be useful to someone in a book as well. I remember a Minecraft survival guide book I had a few years ago, and it listed first nights first and the Ender Dragon near the end. My thought is we could do something similar for other video game and tech-related topics.

Basically, for a guide, we list topics related to getting started first, and topics of advanced difficulty near the end. So the “Characters” subsection would be higher up in the example guide I gave.

Toolkits and hacks are not exactly what I am looking for either; for guides, the order the topics are listed matters. That is probably why the first experiments failed (I do not know for sure); it did not pay attention to particular order. Also, there was no way to edit the pages to add more if new articles were added. “Your future” on the HSH page should have been listed first.

@JayneG or @Chris_H can you give more details on the “toolkits” idea? It is not exactly what I am proposing, but it would be helpful to understand how the grouping of certain articles failed in the same manner as our category structure.

What I am proposing is 1. a way for people to find a certain topic (so if the reader searches “genshin impact”, they’d stumble across my guide), and 2. a way for project members to keep track of their progress, as the guide while a work in progress would constantly have articles commented out and lots of comments explaining certain things to other editors on what topic should be written next, what is in highest demand, etc.

I think it would also be useful to have a magic word that tells the parser that it is a guide, not a how-to (maybe __GUIDE__). And forget about the protection, we can just let regular anons add articles as well.

2 Likes
4

So, basically, what you’re primarily asking for is a way to get around the category hold?

I don’t think most people come across wikiHow (or most websites) looking to page through article after article to learn what they want to - they want the information in one place so they can find it and be done with it. Especially for something like games, which can be paused or quit for awhile, or something that takes an extended period to learn, like instruments or playing chess - you’re not going to be looking for a guide on the entire thing all at once. Even if you’re looking up a video game walkthrough, you’re typically looking for that one specific chapter or one specific task and that’s it - not the entire thing.

5

Although I can see pros and cons, I think this could be an idea worth investigating. We have https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Origami which is somewhat of a compilation of different articles pertaining to origami that are linked out from the one original article. @Awesome_Aasim , if you’d be interested in fleshing the idea out and creating something that is structured in your user space, I’d be happy to take a look and pass it along to see if it’s something that we can try implementing, or whether it might spark ideas for further investigation or collaboration:slight_smile:

I think the toolkit idea simply got put to the side, so the team could potentially be open to something like this (no promises, of course!).

4 Likes
6

I thought the example I posted in my first post would be good enough:cowboy_hat_face:

Anyway, I am currently working on an example (but still work in progress) guide just to demonstrate how it could potentially look.

For the topic I chose, the guide could be located at https://wikihow.com/Genshin-Impact . We could do the same for Wikipedia and other topics that have historically been deleted or turned into hard redirects or stuff like that.

1 Like
7

I understand where you are coming from, @Awesome_Aasim , but I don’t see how this is any different from just plain old categories. I don’t think most readers would have the patience to read article after article in a guide, either.

8

Here is what an example guide might look like:

https://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=User:Awesome-Aasim/Guide:-Genshin-Impact

Guides could be the only place where red links can be allowed. Sure everything shows up on Wanted Pages, but guides serve two purposes: help readers find the articles they want, and help editors understand which articles are needed for the guide to be complete. We can always use code to hide the red links when readers view the guide. We can also use code to display tiles for the guide. We can even include the guide in its respective category. The category can say “There is a guide associated with this category”, and the articles can say “This article is part of a larger guide about [topic name].” I know it may be a bit early, but I’d say a good criteria for the guide to be made live (aside from not violating the deletion policy) is that the guide covers as many topics as possible and that each guide has all intro articles green linked and at least three green links for each section and all the sections needed for the guide to provide extensive coverage of the topic. We could even have a magic word as above so that the parser and the booster knows the article is a guide.

If only we had the Visual Editor on the site to make editing all these different pages and styles of pages easy.

And the comments can help editors list more topics:

image
image 1466×1132 140 KB
1 Like
9

Please no red links on guides. I’d rather not see them show up on Wanted Pages. We use that page to keep articles maintained and remove broken links. If guides were added to that page permanently, it would clutter it up and make it harder to find articles. I would say if you wanted to add an article that does not yet exist onto the guide, I would say just use comments. No red links on the wanted pages page, and they will be hidden from readers, no extra code needed.

You can also use the talk page to coordinate making articles for the guide as well.

3 Likes
10

You know the initial purpose of Wanted Pages is to help editors find and create pages on topics that do not exist. That is why I was thinking we could use Wanted Pages for that as well. If a topic is deemed to be inappropriate, I believe there is this delinker script that can remove all incoming links to a specific page. We can’t use it because we do not have user CSS/JS enabled, but other wikis have used scripts like these. But then we are not other wikis.

11

That might be the original purpose of Wanted Pages, but that is not what we use it for here on wikiHow. Our tool to find pages to create is the Answer Requests Tool , not Wanted Pages.

5 Likes
12

It seems that every suggestion/ feedback/ comment/ prediction/ observation/ that Aasim makes, he does to show what wikiHow is not as compared to wikipedia, Wikimedia and other wikis.

3 Likes
13

@Awesome_Aasim I agree that there should not be red links on a page that we want to present as an idea to create. We would need to have a full guide of articles that already exist for this to be something that we look into. Perhaps you have another category or topic that this might work for?

4 Likes
14

I guess that is what the “new article boost” system is also for. If a guide is created and it seems incomplete, it can be demoted until it is completed. A category this might work for is “Windows”. We could have a few getting started/basics articles at the beginning like how to shut down your computer, using your computer in the middle (like installing and using certain programs), and more advanced tasks like registry editor at the end. There could also be a link to order a hardcopy of the guide. IMHO this would be a better way to make money than placing answers behind a paywall. Then offline pages can be removed and added back as a premium feature.

15

I also went ahead and commented out the red links in my example… though it would be nice if there was a way for editors to still see those red links so they know which guides are needed. It will not fill up wanted pages, but there should still be some indicator that a guide is needed. It would say “article (needed page)” that when clicked on, they could be taken through the article creator.

16

(Minor note, but for the sake of my sanity consistency with other ___: domains, if this were to come about, could there please not be a space between the colon and word after the colon? :P)

1 Like
17

That is not a domain. That is a namespace. The actual location would either be Guide: Guide name or simply be Guide name. It would not have the “how to” text before it, just “Guide: Genshin Impact”.

18

(I’m referring to the other namespaces like wikiHow: and Special:…)