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We’ve moved to “step 3” on mobile tip ratings much faster than I thought. Here is the initial forum post describing how step 3 is the ability to easily write a tip from a mobile phone: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/5207/new-feature-ratings-for-tips-on-mobile-phones We have a test version of this live on around 6000 articles right now. So if you are on your mobile, you can now easily leave a tip on an article where this test is live!. As a result we are now getting a bunch of tips submitted from people on their phones. This is good news and bad news. On the bad news front many of these tips will be basically useless and we are probably better off rolling them back. This is what these new tips look like on a diff page: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Know-for-Sure-if-a-Boy-Likes-You-Before-You-Ask-Him-Out&diff=8846942&oldid=8640986 Notice the edit summary says “adding tip from mobile”. The above tip isn’t bad, but some of these mobile tips will need a rollback, such as: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Find-Christmas-Presents-That-Your-Parents-Have-Hidden&diff=prev&oldid=8846486 Patrollers - Please be active with “quick edit” to improve these tips or press rollback for the hopeless cases!On the good news front, getting more tips does help our readers, even if we have to delete 9 tips to get 1 good one! My hunch is that the vast majority of the tips we get via mobile phones will be sub-standard. Most will need editing help, fact checking, or deletion. We may want to build a special feature to help editors improve or delete these tips before they go live on wikiHow. We at the wikiHaus will be monitoring how well this initial batch of 6000 articles does before we make any decisions one way or the other!

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http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Impress-a-Girl-and-Make-Her-Fall-in-Love-with-a-Boy&diff=8848752&oldid=8844869 Coming in pretty quickly… two different IPs within 15 minutes of each edit… so don’t always go for the rollback option!

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It seems that mobile users can get around protected pages. http://www.wikihow.com/Build-Self-Confidence?action=history

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That appears to be correct. Adding tips from mobile allows bypassing protection. In this case, even sysop protection. Something to look into. Lemme think… @Krystle is gone for a bit… I think @Jordansmall worked on it…

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That reminded me to add this warning to to the wikiHow article on writing secure software for the web . Treating AJAX requests the same way that you do any other HTTP request is, by the way, pretty basic shit. People are paid money to not know this sort of thing?

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Hey all - I’ve just put up the fix and the caches are being cleared for those pages. Within a few minutes no one should be able to add tips to protected pages. Thanks for the catch!!

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Alright awesome! Thanks @Bsteudel !

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Another tip of this - while merging youth articles, I’m coming across a lotof redundant information between steps and tips, so despite that a new tip from a mobile device is added and looks good, it might be the exact same thing but worded differently somewhere else in the article.

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I had removed what looks like a redundant edit about carrots containing too much sugar for rabbits, and couldn’t convince someone it didn’t need to be contained in two steps back to back, here http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Raise-a-Healthy-Bunny&diff=8800656&oldid=8800623 to the point I finally gave up trying to explain why I removed it. It did look like a good edit, but repeating the same statement doesn’t improve the article in my opinion. The most common one suggestion I see added is ‘‘Be yourself’’, it almost seems automatic to add that comment, even on articles that are actually about a topic that is telling the reader to ‘‘be someone else’’, whether they want to ‘‘Be Emo’’, or ‘‘Be Massie Block’’ (my all time least favorite topic). I also am skeptical when someone gives a tip that sounds like it might work, but the accuracy is questionable, such as a commonly added tip to an acne article about mixing a paste of salt and water and allowing it to dry on a pimple. There isn’t any evidence I can find that this is beneficial, although it isn’t likely to be harmful either, so the question emerges as to whether the tip should stay, or be removed.

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So true! One thing I’ve truly learned from wikiHow is that it is always best to “be yourself”. Ha! Oh my. I personally think we should remove redundant tips like this. Regarding tips of questionable quality and accuracy, unless we can reference them to a reliable 3rd party source, I’d say we get rid of them. We are now working on the tool which will allow community to more easily and quickly edit or remove the mobile tips we don’t think are wikiHow worthy.

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I saw a lot yesterday that added redundant or contradictory tips. Now and then, there was one that didn’t need to be edited or rolled back, but it was being used for comments/discussion and for the reader to give their general thoughts about the article or what they would do rather than adding real, useful information. Also, I ran into a couple protected pages (in RC earlier today) that had tips added from mobile. Just fyi.

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@Isorythmic Can you provide URLs of protected pages where mobile tips were added in the last 3 days? It would help us fix that bug.

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@JackHerrick I knew someone (you) was going to ask:slight_smile:Unfortunately, I don’t have them, I was on my tablet at the time. I can try to find them if there is way to view a list of all the protected pages?