This began on a user’s talk page.
Hi. I have tens of thousands of edits on Wikia, Wikipedia, and the Wikimedia Commons. If having a relevant source link instantly deleted is how it’s done here, then I am out of here. If your removal of my edit is not reverted, or a reasonable explanation given, then I will be deleting my account here. I have better things to do than argue with clueless spamfighters who don’t bother to read what they delete. I am referring to my edit here:
By the way, wikihow pages don’t seem to have watch links except during editing. It is no wonder so many wikihow pages are out of date, and have so many errors. Few people watch the pages, and those that do watch pages, or try to edit them. often get run off by admins and spamfighters. Brilliant. The above is my initial angry reaction. Some people replied on my talk page. Feel free to move the replies here where general discussion may do more good.
My edit is still not returned. My text is still deleted. The link was moved by someone to the bottom of the page where it does little good. It seems that Wikihow does not have a good referencing system like Wikipedia. Can’t click a reference number at the end of a sentence. Nor, apparently, can one click the source link right under the text where it is most relevant. As I do on Wikia.
I was trying to help someone on Facebook get some money help via Paypal, and I noticed this Wikihow article popped up in my Google search for more info on Paypal’s system. So I put some relevant info in the Wikihow article.
Watch links should be at the top of an article if you want more people to watch articles. Watch links buried elsewhere will be less used, especially by new editors. Even experienced wiki editors from elsewhere who are used to watch links at the top.
system
2
Hey, @Timeshifter
. Thank you for taking the time to join our community and write this post expressing your concerns about the rollback of your edit. I know that it can be discouraging to have your edits rolled back, and I apologize that your initial experiences here have been this way.
Our External Links policy
provides guidance on how we use external links in articles. We generally don’t use embedded external links within articles, except where it’s a crucial part of the instructions.
I have tweaked the intro here
to help incorporate your edits.
Regarding the watch links on articles, you’re definitely correct that we don’t place the watch links in as prominent locations as wikis like Wikipedia. Each of our articles have a Watch link at the very bottom of the article, and you can also add pages to your watch list manually at https://www.wikihow.com/Special:EditWatchlist
wikiHow is unique from other wikis like Wikipedia in the sense that we have a robust tool to monitor edits to articles and verify that each edit is helpful. This process is called Recent Changes Patrol, and you can learn more about this process here: How to Patrol Recent Changes on wikiHow
. Watching articles isn’t as critical here since we have this tool to help us monitor edits. With this said, we definitely appreciate your feedback about the placement of the link.
I hope that you decide to stick around here. We are not the same as Wikipedia or Wikia, but many of our community members enjoy contributing to both wikis and come to appreciate the differences in how each community operates.
As someone who was involved in the situation, I’d like to add - we do have a way of referencing using ref tags, but since this external link easily explained the process that our article reiterated, I decided to put it in at the end of the article since it essentially cites the whole page. It seemed odd to just have it point at one spot in the page when it applies to all of it. I apologize - I didn’t mean to be discouraging by moving it!
@Eric
, there’s a broken link on the External Links policy page. Can you do your magical admin thing and clean that up?
1 Like
system
4
Good reminder - thanks for mentioning that! How to Reference Sources on wikiHow
walks through this process in detail. :)
The source links are returned. I will look more closely next time. I’m so sorry because I feel like I accidentally discouraged someone.
TuckerB
6
Hey, Timeshifter - thanks for taking the initiative to contribute to wikiHow and for speaking up when you notice something that looks off.
Given your wiki experience, I’m sure you can imagine how often wikiHow is a target of promotional edits that undermine the impartial approach that we try to abide by. Most of the time, we do a great job of catching those edits when they come in, but sometimes, an edit that’s intended to be helpful can appear to be commercial in nature.
In a situation like this, the edit you made violated our external links guidelines for several reasons, and our patrollers were following our recommended practices when they reverted. Eric did a good job of explaining our rationale here - moreover, since this was an edit from a relatively new contributor that linked to a commercial product in the article’s introduction (where its aim may well have been to distract the reader from the content of the article), I sympathize with someone who’s familiar with our external link policy and who is patrolling dozens of edits at a time seeing your edit and sincerely believing it to be unhelpful.
We always strive to be accountable to our edits, which is why I see it as a success that you were able to see that your edit had been reverted, you spoke up about why you thought the change that was made was off, and we were able to make a compromise that incorporates your edit’s content while abiding by wikiHow’s guidelines. I think you’d have found that the response you’d have received would have been equally swift and effective had you approached @Adelaide
assuming best intentions, rather than with anger - indeed, that’s the way our community operates every day, and it works quite well.
If you have any other questions about our policies or actions that are taken on edits that you make, feel free to drop me a message on my Talk Page. I’ll be more than happy to explain anything that doesn’t sit well with you, and we can figure out what to do if the way they’re applied to a specific edit undermines our ability to help our readers. I know that all wikis have different cultures and navigating those differences can be difficult and frustrating, but we’d be happy if you chose to stick around!
