An ongoing problem which has recently escalated is the issue of one contributor or a group of contributors bringing a string of unhelpful, low quality, or self-serving new articles into the database. These burden the community with processing multiples of the same issue. Not to point any fingers, but some examples:
- Kingsoft’s ongoing parade on how to use each and every minor feature in their software suite
- Martin Wang and associates cloning online store conversion instructions: Platform-to-Platform and Cart-to_Cart
- MyHobbyShop’s publishing of neat blog entries without being bothered to format in wikiHow style
- WRM’s never-ending dumping of obviously deficient instruction which begs a leg up from the community
It seems that we might need:
- Policy adjustment
- Coaching templates
- A clearinghouse mechanism
system
2
It would seem the deletion policy would sufficiently cover the ground you are describing, at least in theory. We are not really supposed to judge an introductory page as ‘‘worthless’’ (my words, not yours) until it is given a fair chance. There are cases where content seems to languish and even use website resources for months, especially with the NAB backlog we are presently faced with. I have seen content that has benefited from wikiPhoto’s contributions finally found and nominated for deletion when a booster makes their way around to it, but that says more about wikiPhoto’s screening process than lack of boosting. One thing that would obviously help the overall situation would be to reinforce educating patrollers to fully tag a new article before marking it patrolled, or to create a separate queue for new articles to keep them under more experienced scrutiny? The fact that there is a speedy category for spam content is often overlooked, and in general, it seems the speedy deletion tool isn’t fully recognized or utilized as it could be to address many very low quality pages.
system
3
I would either agree with the latter part - or (because this would be a far-fetched idea for the engineers), would be to remove the ‘mark as patrolled’ button from newly created articles until one edits it (either places the appropriate tags, formats, spellchecks, etc), and then they may mark as patrol.
system
4
I love this idea. I definitely think there is room for a tool that screens new articles specifically. RC patrol is built for edits, NAB is built for editing. Screening is a very different task. You don’t have to be an awesome “boost editor” to know the policy well and recognize which articles need which templates.
It’s @MyHobbyStore
, not @MyHobbyShop
, but I agree - this would be a great tool. It would help with future commercial articles and prevent some of them from sitting in NAB.
system
6
Post script, I do fully agree with Ron in the fact the people he mentioned are using wikiHow, its volunteers, and its good reputation to promote their products at the expense of efforts that could be furthering our mission…although I seem to have forgotten what that was… Shame on you, Ron, for echoing my opinion of WRM…
Lojjik
7
New pages: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:Newpages
Which is basically the RCPatrol equivalent of Special:Recentchanges, for new pages
