1

I saw a discuss comment on How to Pop a Cyst while in RCPatrol:

  • It’s called “pop a cyst” and number 2 or 3 is “don’t pop the cyst”… completely misleading
    I think it is bad when I know immediately that this had to be a WRM creation., and, from this immediate knowing, several questions surfaced:
  • Why is wikiHow paying to have their name smeared by article titles that promise one thing, then immediately say not to do that very thing or that it can’t be done?
  • Shouldn’t this WRM modus operandi (which I thought had stopped) be put under patroller scrutiny?
    The community is trusting WRM (under staff oversight) to act in the best interest of wikiHow and that trust seems to be being betrayed on an ongoing basis, so maybe it is time to bring WRM article creations through RCP. Opinions?
2

I would rather not see their content in Recent Changes, it really bums me out and gives me a bad attitude.

3

@BR Sad, but true.

4

I think these articles should go through RC patrol. It gives at least some chance for community input and scrutiny. Otherwise the first time a patroller is likely to encounter a new WRM article is after it undergoes categorization, but I’m not sure how closely the articles are being checked in that stage, since they’ve already been autopatrolled in after being created. With 20 or so WRM contributions a day I don’t think it would put a strain on the RC number, so why not have them checked by the community? I don’t see how it could hurt, and it could only improve the situation.

5

I agree with @Isorhythmic . All new articles should go through RC Patrol. While this is not always the case, the overwhelming majority of new articles are just plain junk (I see these in RC very often and I just skip them, since some are so terrible I don’t want to deal with them). I think that the staff does a good job of running wikiHow, and I respect them. However, unless there an RC backlog crisis, I think that all the edits should be reviewed, especially when the editor (in this case, WRM) has an unfavorable history.

6

Sorry for late reply - Being a relative newbie in the history of WRM, I wanted to find out about why it was out of RC historically and what the engineering limitations were, before responding here. Now I’m up to speed! The people behind WRM have learned a lot from trying different approaches and from feedback, but still make mistakes sometimes, as we all do. Emma, Chris, and others on the project are always actively working on ways to improve what’s published – like the focus on credentialed experts right now, which is largely a result of helpful feedback from you all! No system can be perfect, like with any editor or project. However, overall, I’d say there is some really good content coming out of there, particularly recently with Emma’s new experiments in getting expert input from professionals in the given topic areas. Anyway, to the RC issue! In the past, the number of articles created under WRM has been higher, and we haven’t wanted to clog RC up with those edits. But Jeff makes a great point about the more manageable edit quantities now. Today I spent a couple of hours looking and testing settings/options to put the bot edits back in RC. It’s unfortunately not as simple as I’d hoped: this change can’t be made right now without altering the whole way that bots work, which would require engineering bandwidth that we don’t have at the moment, especially with the mobile redesign coming soon (and requiring a lot of bug fixing and back-end work right now). As is, putting WRM edits in RC would also put those articles back in NAB, which is a whole burden that nobody wants to put on the community, when the NAB backlog is so long and ever-growing. I talked to Jack and Elizabeth, though, and confirmed that putting WRM edits in RC is something we can think more about when engineering time is less tight. So, for the meantime, I’ve been brainstorming more ways to get community input here, for those who want to review these articles. For starters, I put the list of the most recent articles by WRM on its user page, here . The various articles and edits are also accessible from the contributions list , of course. While Emma, Chris, and the others behind the scenes have their own process for review, and no system will ever be perfect (wish it could be, but we are all human!), getting more edits and feedback from you guys will only help the project improve. I think the changes in relation to the credentialed expert arm of WRM have been really neat overall, producing some really helpful content, and I’m excited to see what @Emazing and the gang can do with further feedback, too.