I wanted to announce a major new feature that some of you may not have even noticed yet. On November 19th we rolled out the ability to rate tips from your mobile phone. Here is a screenshot from a phone:
The interaction with this tool has been HUGE! In under 2 weeks we have gathered 641,976 votes on tips, spread out over 32,867 articles. Every day we get 30,000 to 60,000 more votes from 8,000 to 12,000 different people. Here is another way to think about that: In the course of a month ~300,000 people will help improve wikiHow by telling us over 1 million times which tips are helpful and which aren’t. They won’t talk to us on talk pages, or show up in recent changes, but they are helping us. That’s a LOT of people.
Future Step 2: wikiHaus engineer @Jordansmall
http://www.wikihow.com/User:Jordansmall
is working on a way to sort ratings based on reader votes. We’ve already been testing things internally and we’ve found these votes are quite helpful at rank ordering the best tips from the worst tips. Here is an explanation of the algorithm we will be using to rank tips: http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-sort-by-average-rating.html
In the cases where the majority of voters find the tip unhelpful and we have a lot of votes confirming the tip is bad, we may even take the step of automatically deleting the tip. We are hoping that this automatic sorting will be ready soon. Future Step 3: If step 2 looks good we are going to start encouraging our readers to leave more tips. Assuming we have the ability to automatically rank good tips and delete bad tips, we can handle getting more tips than we do now. That said, we’d probably also want to build a tool to help editors patrol and copyedit tips as they came in. It could be a fun tool since there are many of us who enjoy copyediting. If this works and we end up getting a ton of tips, we may want to automatically limit articles to only showing the top 10 tips. All this step 3 functionality is probably several months off if it ever gets built. Overall, I’m really excited about the early success of this tool. It’s great that we can enable an additional 300,000 people to make over 1 million votes, which will help continue improving the quality of our articles. It’s one more step on our mission to build and share the web’s best how to guides! Many thanks to @Jordansmall
for building these new features!
system
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I did notice that. Nice job!
system
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Fantastic ideaThis has a lot of potential to really boost the experience and quality of the site. When readers can vote on tips and add their own, they are more likely to come back again as they feel they can contribute in a way they are comfortable with. It will also create more article relevance when readers see hundreds or even thousands have voted that its a good tip, they are more likely to value and try the good ideas. I like it! Edit: Is there any way non-mobile wikiHowians can access this polling data so they can improve the article content?
@Kalyx
You can currently see the polling data for any page by changing the URL from http://www.wikihow.com/Save-Money
to http://m.wikihow.com/Save-Money
system
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Awesome! I just voted on a tip and it said Booyah! ROFL
system
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Booyah! is a USMC thing, is Jordan a (ahem…) jarhead?
system
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Dude. “Booyah” is a slang term when you’re overjoyed. “Oorah” is the USMC celebration term.
I’m impressed! This even works on my (ancient by tech-standards) smartphone! Thanks, Jack!
Quick question: Will this feature be implemented into the desktop version of wikiHow at a later date, too? Also, if the ordering of tips based on votes is successful, will the change in ordering show up on the main site as well?
system
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@BR
Not a jarheadI actually got som help on those responses from everyone at the wikiHaus.
The reordering of tips will appear to everyone. In fact this has already happened in some cases. (if it has happened you can find a bot edit in page history that will be clearly marked.) I’m not sure if we will ever put the feature in desktop in the same way though. We may do a similar but different feature on the desktop and don’t want to create confusion.
