There are so many article requests out there that are completely impractical. Unless our authors suddenly find a way to make each “joke request” a more practical how to, and bring us back to sunny skies, we need to find a way to restrict article requests. And if certain requests go too long without being answered, or are considered bad ideas for request due to spelling errors or the like, they won’t show up anymore. I get annoyed when I find a whole page of requests I don’t know how to answer, and it angers me more when half of them sound a lot like jokes. Who’s with me?
I don’t get how people could answer requests. I’m with you 99.99%.
Well, I’m sure there’s sound reasoning for the 0.01% against.
I’ve seen talk about a link to where admins can delete requested article titles. I’ve never used it or looked for it, so I don’t know where it is.
I think it makes sense. Maybe, admins could award the power to wikiHow veterans who are not admins, and users who have proven themselves worthy…? I am with you 99.99999 percent…
Yeah, I don’t know what an admin’s screen looks like but I bet there is one.
I dunno why I said %99.99
This will make answering requests SO much easier! Oh, yeah. You can customize.
Well, there would be a lot more work for deleting suggestions, but not nearly as much work as answering them without getting speedied. Maybe people should answer ridiculous suggestions for the sake of getting speedied so the requests don’t show up anymore?
Maniac
9
We need a huge group of people to seriously tackle the requests. There’s a few issues that I see with the requests, that would stop anyone from just purging all of the old ones or removing all of the duplicates or whatever else, without having a real person go through each and every request. There’s some requests still in the queue from years ago that are actually really good requests that could really benefit wikiHow. If we removed all of the requests from, let’s say 2 years ago and older, we would end up getting rid of those good requests as well. It’s tough to see any change with the requests because the number is so high. It’s one of the things on wikiHow that scares me a little bit because I agree; the category is filled with so much stuff that it’s tough for an editor to maneuver around to find a request that suits them. A week or two ago I began going through requests and I deleted upwards of 500 of them…but when you’re looking at 400,000+ requests, no one really notices the impact of 500 being gone. For right now, from a user standpoint, if you want to help out remove duplicates you can do so through the request tool, although it’s not perfect. If you click “Write” next to the request’s title and we have an article with a very similar title, the tool should show that to you and you can then tell it that the request is a duplicate. That action will place the article in a “Proposed Redirects” category which NABbers and Administrators can then review. If the NABber or Admin agrees that it’s a duplicate, the request is removed from the queue and a redirect is made. With the help of others, we cleaned up that category as well over the last few weeks, which I know cleared up another few hundred requests. As far as the crazy/impossible requests that aren’t necessarily duplicates, Admins can remove them manually but that does take some time…
http://www.wikihow.com/Special:ManageSuggestedTopics
Here is one place where admins can help out by accepting, rejecting, or editing requests. I used to keep this pretty well trimmed down, but was on an extended vacation and it got out of hand. Any request made by a wikiHow editor goes through this gateway before going live, so that is a way to keep out jokes. Help would be appreciated. These requests do not show until and unless an admin accepts them. If any admin reading this would take a minute to clear out five or ten of these requests, that would help a lot, but it won’t do anything to work on the existing requests. Later I can post about where to go to help with that.
I’m glad to see people are seeing this my way. But what can really be done? We need to make it so that anonymous users can still make a positive difference, yet set up more precautions preventing them from making wikiHow much worse. How can this be done? Does anyone have any ideas for stopping this wikiCrisis?
Oh! Now I remember something about these deletions. I used to do quite a few deletions from this page http://www.wikihow.com/Special:ManageSuggestions
but then I stopped when it was not clear to me that my actions were taking effect. I have just deleted FIND MISTERIES because it appears to be misspelled (and unclear). I have also just deleted Poop in the Wilderness When Camping because that one, if answered, would likely result in a duplicate of http://www.wikihow.com/Go-to-the-Bathroom-in-the-Woods
. Let’s check back in a few days and see if they are both gone. If they are, I will be glad to process five or ten deletions at a time, if people will simply find some titles which need to be deleted, and add them to this thread. If three or four other admins would be willing to do the same thing, we could make steady progress through a number of request deletions over the coming year. Just to keep track…here are some more which I have deleted today. Again, I am going to be checking back to see if these are truly gone from the database in a few days. The suggestion “Grow Shitake Mushrooms” has been removed. The suggestion “Raise Shitake” has been removed.
At the moment we have 450,688 requests to be answered.
system
14
@KnowItSome
… are you using the first or third box from “Manage Suggestions”?
system
16
The third section is automatically deleted, but you need to manually copy and paste - it’s really useful when you’re scanning a very long list of the same keyword and not 8-12 at the same time.
Oh, good. I will try that. Thanks. I usually don’t use that box, on the assumption that it is easy to make a typo and miss my article.
We are down to 450,630 requests to be answered at this point. Thanks for the deletions, whoever is doing them!
Oliver
20
I’m also working on a way for regular editors to report to admins requests that should be deleted, because it’s hard to find all of them ourselves.
