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Surprise! We’re soft-launching a new tool today:smiley:

This one is for the techies and Tech Testers out there… it’ll hopefully provide an easier way to find tech topics and verify whether they work. We’ll use the results to help prioritize and inform updating/accuracy edits, and potentially to add tech review team stamps, too (for the pages that are in good shape).

If this sounds up your alley, check it out here: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:TechTesting

When you load up the tool, you can pick a platform/service to test. These options will change depending on current needs, so if you don’t see one you want to try now, check back often - sometimes they’ll be fairly broad like ‘iPhone’ or ‘Android’ and other times they might be more specific, like ‘Twitter on iPhone’ or ‘TikTok on Android’ (for example, if one of these apps has been updated recently and we need to check what topics in that category area need redoing).

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After you find a topic you want to test, follow the steps of the article exactly as written/shown. If everything works great, you can vote ‘Yes’ and provide a bit of info about what device/OS you tested on. If something is off in the steps or images, vote ‘No’ and tell us what went wrong. 

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Nothing automatic happens to the article based on these votes, but @Rosalind-Lutsky and our tech team will use the feedback to inform updates and bold edits on those pages (and if anyone else wants to help with those edits, let me know - I can send you the feedback on the pages that interest you, too!). And when topics get only positive results, we may put up a tech tested stamp, too. 

Big cheers to @Argutier for working hard on getting this one live. We hope you guys like it! If you find any bugs or issues, or have suggestions for what kind of platforms you’d like to test, def let us know. We have a bug or two to on our list to iron out already, but once they’re sorted, we’ll get it up on the Community Dashboard as well:slight_smile:

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Oh, and a few of you might recognize this tool from an early beta version we tested out over a year ago… big thanks to @Mohil-Khare , @KommaH , and @Batreeq for helping to test the early idea back then. Hope you like the updates! 

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Woohoo! I’m super excited-- going to test this out right now!

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Woah, this is so great! Can’t wait to try this one out! 

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This is a great idea! Will be trying it out right now.

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Good job everyone!

Cool!

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Good luck!

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That’s such a good idea!

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@Anna thanks for taking my idea!  I will try it when I get time:slight_smile:

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Hi Anna, I tried a few Android based article right now. I skipped the articles that had multiple methods with either of them asking you to connect the device to a mac or asking you to reset your memory. My question is, if I tried the viable first and second method on the article, do I need to skip making a remark on the widget if i didnt try the third method of connecting it to other device?

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Nice - I’m glad folks are liking the idea so far! Thanks all for helping to test it out. Good question, @Vishshua ! Yeah, we’ll have to see whether multiple method, more complex articles go over well in the tool or not - they might be trickier for everyone. But skipping is fine, of course. If you try some but not all of the methods and they *don’t* work, then you can def vote No and give feedback on those (and maybe just say something like ‘I didn’t test method 3’). If you find they do work, though, I would just skip because we don’t want a Yes vote unless all methods are confirmed correct as written. Make sense?

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@Vishshua I tried clarifying the in-tool instructions a little. Does that help?

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Hi @Anna , If I got it right, this is the instruction - “Only press Yes if you’re able to confirm the whole article works. If you can only test part of it and you find that portion does not work, vote No and leave your feedback. Otherwise, press Skip.” It looks good. Well done with the clarification. This also means that there is no partial checking with one or two methods. It is reassuring even for us as editors to know that the articles are ‘scientific’, the tool is utilized thoroughly for quality and the testing is fool-proof.:slight_smile:

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@Vishshua   Glad it helped - thanks for the feedback! Yeah, well, the only partial checking you can report is if you find something wrong - then it’s okay to report that regardless of whether you tested the rest… but just only press Yes if you can confirm the whole thing works, since we may use those votes to add tech review stamps:slight_smile:

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@Anna Ah. Okay. The problems get reported nonetheless. I’ll keep that in mind for reference. You are welcome.:slight_smile:

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@Anna , I tried this earlier in the week on a handful of articles. Sorry to see that there is no “PC” option in the drop-down list - only iPhone and Android - Grrrrrrr! I don’t think I"ll be in this tool much (at least not at the moment)…I actually enjoy other tools more. Sorry.

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Ahh, well, @Byankno1 that might change depending on the time/day/project/readers - so if you don’t see one you want to try now, check back in future. Maybe we’ll do some computer-based ones at some point! Would it be Windows 10 that you’re interested in? 

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Here and there, quite potentially, but some other regular websites are good too!

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Yea, def potential for website-based tech tasks, especially after any big redesigns and so on! Good point, and luckily the tool is flexible enough to take those as well:slight_smile:

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I feel like a lot of the format has changed in between Android versions and maybe even phones (I am using the most recent phone and one of the newer Oreo versions), so some of the articles are not that accurate. But I’m sure people with the version/phone that the article uses still exist, so how do we get around that? 

I haven’t had much experience in editing tech articles:stuck_out_tongue: