As most active users here probably know, new articles are now de-indexed by default and are not public until they are approved by NABers. In light of this, I’ve created a (hopefully) encouraging template that can be left on the talk page of new article creators. I want to seek consensus for it before it becomes widely used. Here’s the link: ( http://www.wikihow.com/User:WritingEnthusiast14/NewArticle
). If you have any suggestions on how this template can be improved, please post them here. I’m looking forward to your input!
For sure, something like this is needed. I think @Krystle
has envisioned a separate talk page that works much the same as the Help Team talk page, but is serviced by a separate team. For, my money, I would make the message shorter and more succinct, plus provide a self-help option which might simply be a link to a yet-to-be created quick reference on bringing an article up to speed.
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There seems to be a little repeating within the wording: Would you like your article to be public? To ensure that the public sees high-quality content, new articles are not public until they are approved by New Article Boosters. Do you want your article to be public? If so, please ensure that it does not violate the deletion policy and conforms… When it comes to these things, there’s that question of “why is there a need of a template?” Why can’t the approach editor review the article and elaborate the certain conditions and offer advice along with the “public notice” in a personal typed message? Why leave it in the hands of the article creator to fix their own article with just the help of a link or two to the guidelines, not knowing what else can be done?
@Maluniu
. I do feel everyone should be contacted soon after they publish and automated seems the way to go. It does also seem that it would be good to invite them to respond to a page where they can receive timely guidance. Additionally, providing the self-help option might be preferred by new article creators and I don’t see how it hurts the proposition any to offer that route. This is not necessarily to force it upon anyone, but just to offer it as an option. The gateway article could provide many resources and also recommend visiting the Hatch team talk page to pick up a mentor.
I was sort of in a rush when I wrote this template (something suddenly came up IRL), so I expected that there would be mistakes that I would not catch. In any case, I’ve fixed the duplicate wording. @Maluniu
While personalized messages are nice, they do take much longer to write, and there’s no possible way that we can write a personalized message for every article that is created. (That’s like getting rid of the WelcomeBot and saying that we should write a personal message to every single user who registers, which, of course, is impossible.) For these reasons, I feel a standardized template with basic information would be useful. @Alabaster
You say that you would like the template to be more short and succinct. Do you have any ideas on how to do this? If you do, please feel free to edit the template.
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Nice. Could use some paragraph separation or “white space”, but I like the general idea.
@Loiswade42
I’ve separated the template into paragraphs.
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If we send this to everyone who starts a new article, I’m worried it might be a little intimidating and formal. I’m a big fan of a simple, friendly approach to people who are new, like: Hey there, Congrats on publishing an article on wikiHow! That’s a big step! Thanks for sharing your knowledge here. Are you interested in making your article available to a wider audience? If so, you might want to ask for suggestions here: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/13044/i-would-like-to-help-get-my-article-indexed-in-search-engines/p1
Let me know if you have any questions
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Krystle’s is better. Plenty of white space, friendly, short enough to be read instead of summarily deleted, gives a link to the TL:DR version for later reference. I definitely like the idea of this sort of info being given to each new article author. Do we have a good “new author tips” sort of page we can link them to? The forums can be very lagy, and I’d rather not depend on a forum link for new author information.
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What about a nifty page kind of like wikiHow:Tourtext - wikiHow
or the Q & A page, where the most common Q & A concerning new pages being searched; then we can outsource people to other helpful pages, such as the Help Team page and the sketched up “new article mentor” group outreach.
I think the Writers’s Guide might be a good source of information. It’s fairly simple and straightforward, but it also has lots of good information.
