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As a couple of you have noticed, we’ve discovered a new feature that allows the system to auto-demote articles if they receive an NFD tag. This was active for a few hours this week, but is not on at the moment.

I wanted to gauge what you think about implementing this feature. It does mean potentially doing things a bit differently to how we’ve done them in the past, but sometimes change can help us improve efficiencies and be helpful in the long run!

Here’s how it would work:If someone (who does not need to be a Booster) adds an NFD tag to an article that hasn’t already been published, it will automatically demote the article and send it to the Quality Review category and into the NFD Guardian 7 days later. The edit that adds the NFD tag would still go into RCPatrol, so it would get another set of eyes checking that it was appropriate. Ideally, the person who adds the NFD tag would also send the author the corresponding NFD template message.

This means that the article would not go into the NAB tool and/or it would be automatically removed from the NAB queue, helping remove low-quality articles from the tool. ( @R2_d2000 we will still have to figure out that double demotion thing when adding the tag from NAB).

Personally, I see this as a way that anyone can help weed out low-quality articles without having to be able to access the NAB tool. As far as I’ve seen, NFD tags are not generally misused by non-boosters for newly-written articles. Plus, we have the backup of any NFD addition still being reviewed in RCPatrol.

This seems like a way we can help keep Boosters’ time for the more helpful articles and authors who are here to contribute positively towards wikiHow.

What do you think?

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That seems like a great feature, if it keeps the bugs at bay. If its worked in a short test without causing other issues, I’m all for it. This would shorten the amount of time boosters are in the tool. When the system demotes the article, what script takes the contribution credit because I’m worried that a non-booster would see that and go “what the heck?; I’m not a Booster yet, and wonder what that was.”

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We would have to consider when people add NFD tags to well-established articles (this often happens with topics they deem controversial)… deindexing well-established articles, even for a short period of time can be damaging if the article is crawled at the wrong time.

If you revert the addition of the NFD tag, does that automatically promote (index) the article again?

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@EpcotMagic I think we could make it so it’s a “Bot” that technically does the demotion. That’s a great point!

@Eric I totally agree, which is why this feature wouldn’t work for articles that are already published, it would only work for newly-written articles that haven’t already been promoted:+1:

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@JayneG Are you kindly telling me to do a better job reading your original post?:rofl:

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I think a potential issue with this is that many times I see others adding nfd tags without notifying the original author. One benefit of having nfd’d articles go through NAB is that the nfd will be reviewed by a booster, so it’s less likely for bad nfds to stay, and two, boosters are much more likely to notify the original author. I think smashing on an nfd tag and having the article demoted without the author knowing or the nfd being properly reviewed could potentially be problematic.

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Overnight, I got thinking about what I said that I’d approve of this change - which I’m going to veto what I was about to say.

What if the NFD was improperly placed through the review in RCP? Removal of the template wouldn’t put the article back into NAB to be reviewed. Also, when demotions happen, that “Articles in Quality Review” template gets added and often editors who’d be reviewing the demotions will often miss removing that as well - seeing as the article should undemote.

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I like this change because I think that it would make it much easier to boost articles. I see articles get demoted and NFD tags added to them multiple times per day from the New Article Boost tool, and I think that adding this feature would really go a long way to reducing that and allowing boosters to focus on the articles that don’t warrant immediate deletion. But someone could add an NFD tag in error, and I think that a revert in the RCP tool should do something in the event that happens.

And I do think that there is a problem with users not being notified when their articles get nominated for deletion, but boosters fail to do this through the NAB tool quite often as well.

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I agree that there is a potentially small issue that could arise with reverting an NFD within RC Patrol. However, I personally think that is a small side-issue that would likely be very infrequent, compared to the everyday benefit. So, I still think it would be worth trialing, and we could have an easy process for if that arises (like having the Patroller post a link to the article on the Article Review Team page for a booster to review) if we don’t have an engineering solution to it.

As for sending notes, I have a Potentially Controversial Take ! I think putting an NFD tag on and not notifying the author on some articles is ok. I’m one of those people that doesn’t always notify an NFD author:scream_cat:. Anyone around here who knows about NFD tags and their purpose probably has a good understanding of who is here for the right reasons and who likely isn’t (content marketers, advertisers etc). I have no problem not sending a message to those that have the wrong intentions. If an author is interested in knowing what happens to their article, they will have notifications turned on and will see when an NFD tag is added to their article via an edit notification even without a talk page message. Of course, we do want to make sure to send a message to anyone who has good intentions and/or whose article has promise, but just wanted to throw some controversy out there:wink:

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If it makes anything better, then why not implement it. Anyways it’s not going to demote published articles.

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Coming back to bump this thread to let everyone know that we have just set this in motion. Unfortunately we couldn’t make it so it showed a Bot as demoting if it’s a non-booster adding the tag on article history pages, but it will show it as a Bot in the logs. Additionally, non-boosters will not be counted in the leaderboards/NAB tool etc.

Other important things to remember/note:We want to encourage non-boosters who may be adding NFDs to reach out to the authors, especially if the author is promising and here with good intentions.

If you are patrolling and remove an NFD addition, please post the article on the Article Review Team page .

I’ll probably make a full announcement about it after we’ve tested it for a bit and see that it’s working how we want it to:slight_smile:

If you notice anything weird with NFD’d articles please let me know!

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Hi Jayne, I appreciate the feature testing as it would make booster’s lives better.

However, I do have concerns because new users might not be familiar with all of wikiHow’s policies and guidelines, and may add a deletion tag when it may not apply. Therefore, while anyone should be able to nominate an article for deletion, ultimately a booster should still review the nomination, etc.

A more workable solution would be for NFD tags to take the article out of the boost queue if non-boosters add so that boosters do not have to look at it again. It would still let recent changes users patrol it though.

For boosters, I agree that adding NFD tags should autodemote.

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This is how it’s working - unless I’m misunderstanding something. The edit adding the NFD still goes through RCPatrol to be patrolled. If someone reverts it in RCPatrol, they should post the article on the Article Review Team page to be reviewed by a booster.

If the NFD edit is approved, the article will be reviewed by boosters after 7 days in NFD Guardian.

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@JayneG With this feature, I am concerned that if an article is NFD’d under the ill, hat, dan, sex, pot or mea codes, it would be auto-demoted, even though these codes are serious. My idea is to demote it to Quality Review with the exception of the codes above.

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@Gravity_Cipher All NFDs are treated the same, with them being demoted and then reviewed after 7 days. I’m not sure that I understand the purpose of not demoting articles with these codes - we want to remove all NFDs from the NAB tool and then review them for deletion after 7 days, like is standard practice.

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Can the “revert” of the tag send the article back into the NAB queue? Of course, a booster can still manually promote and demote.

Of course, really experienced users are more likely to be familiar with policies and guidelines and thus I would not be opposed to these user’s addition of NFDs actually demoting articles.

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@Awesome_Aasim We talked about that previously in this thread, and though it’s something eng tried to make happen, it’s just not possible. That’s why we’re trying out the tactic of placing it on the Article Review Team page instead.

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Does there happen to be a specific NFD category for advertisements? I keep coming across articles that include no valuable information and were clearly written as ads for websites and/or services, though I’m not sure where to put them.

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@Bettercallsaul yes, you can find all of the NFD reasons on our Deletion Policy page; for advertisements in particular, it’s {{nfd|adv}}.

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