1

I have noticed a trend in articles that are in recent changes, boosters, nfd and quality guardians. Articles are being marked as patrolled, boosted, and approved through the guardians without being edited. They are just being left for someone else to do. While it is not practical to ask any one person to do everything, not doing what we can at the moment means that several people have to handle the same article. A collaborative effort indicates that each time an article is handled it is improved in some way. Many articles are being nominated for deletion in the nfd Guardian without even the most basic attempt to save them. I though that was the object of the nfd, SOS, article hospital, etc., to save the articles whenever possible. nfd Guardian brings the articles needing this sort of care to our attention. Articles are being boosted and patrolled through several changed, reflected in the history tab, but they still carry every conceivable conflict with the simple policies of the writer’s guide and the tour. Surely someone should have fixed these errors. A total outsider looking for a How To article, stumbles across wikiHow, and finds our mission and vision statements and a few decent articles will come back for more information later. When he does, he finds articles written so poorly that he wonders how it got there. All of wikiHow suffers. We are not recommended to others, and our presence goes from quality writing to “They will let any first grader slap up an article and call it facts.” I’m not talking about general details. I’m talking about things that make articles so bad that only a major re-write will save them, down to having an article that has only lower-case letters from start to finish. I’m talking about all of them. We need to pay attention to our article quality. If I have the article in front of me, it’s up to me to make substantial improvements rather than to pass it on to someone else. Remember that little piece about “Some Body’s funeral”? Throughout the whole piece, it intimately brings to our attention that “Some Body died because Any Body could have done something, but No Body did.”

2

I think the problem may be that people don’t want to spend their time fixing something rather than doing what they enjoy, but don’t want to put a tag on it to alert others to the problem because they feel they should do the work themselves rather than pass it on to someone else. As a result articles get ignored because the people who see them don’t want to deal with them, and the people who would deal with them don’t see them. I think the best way to deal with this would be to encourage people to add as many tags as they deem necessary to an article with a problem. Yes, this is passing it off to someone else, but it’s passing it off in a constructive way, increasing the chances of the article being fixed. It also informs visitors to the site that we know there is a problem with the article, and that we don’t accept articles of such low quality. wikiHow is a volunteer site. Everyone is free to do as much or as little as they like, and it’s okay to not want to deal with something. It’s perfectly acceptable to just put a tag on something to let someone know there’s a problem there that needs fixing, and doing this is far preferable to just ignoring it. You may not be the person who saves the article, but you might be the reason the person who saves it realises it needs saving.

3

+22

4

True. Some tags is better than acting like the article is ‘hunky dory’. However, don’t forget that for the most part, this doesn’t apply with NAB. That is what we are there for!

5

3 Gold Stars for that answer!

Agreed. As long as they do that.

That’s fine, if they’ll do that. My issue is that they don’t.

6

You’re right, people don’t do that. But I think the reason people don’t do that is because it seems to be discouraged by phrases such as “If I have the article in front of me, it’s up to me to make substantial improvements rather than to pass it on to someone else.” The point I was making is that we need to encourage people to put the tags on rather than insist they deal with it themselves, because insisting people deal with it themselves (which is how your original post reads) results in the situation we have now where things get ignored because people don’t want to do the work themselves and don’t feel they can put the tags on so someone else can fix it.

7

+1. Anything we can do to help improve our quality faster. We should.