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Thanks for raising this! It is disappointing to answer a request only to be told you’ve created a duplicate. It’s not very motivating to go to the effort only to be told it’s not needed. As far as I am aware, there isn’t really a mechanism to help those of us accepting new requests through NAB to know whether or not the request is a duplicate. Therefore, unless it’s obvious from knowing the site, it’s very easy to accept new requests that are duplicates. Happy to be set straight on this if I’m wrong though. And I am happy to be enlightened but I don’t think we can delete requests once they’re accepted anymore. I’d love to learn that we can and that I’ve overlooked some delete button… There is a mechanism to remove the red request links we see at the base of the articles though. That is the broader database and some people regularly clear requests out of that one but it’s a huge job as there are a lot of requests in it.
You can accept new requests through NAB? I’ve just recently become a New Article Booster myself, and I’m still fiddling around with the controls, so to speak, and was not aware of that factor. Also, another thing I’ve noticed is that there are Requested Articles still on the list that have already been written. If we could find a way to solve the original issue, it would be wonderful if we could take care of that as well. Going through the requests and clicking on a title to find that it’s already been written is slightly annoying, because why would the title be there in the first place? The main reason that I brought up this is because the list of requests seems to be a little backed up and, no offense, out of date.
I’d love any additional feedback or solutions to this!
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When you click on a title to write it, you’re usually shown a list of potential duplicates, and are asked if the request you’re writing is the same as any of the titles on the list. The list isn’t always perfect (it doesn’t always turn up obvious duplicates) but it’s the first line of defense against duplicates. Sometimes people totally ignore it though
If you see a duplicate that you’re 100% sure is a duplicate, though (which if you’re a new article booster you should have a pretty solid grip on the merge policy) you can answer it, and create a redirect to the article we already have. For example, if you see “skip rope” in the requests list, you could write the article, but instead of actually writing the article, just write #REDIRECT
[[Jump Rope]] in advanced editor and Publish. That way, if the title was requested by someone who wanted to be notified when it was written, they will get notified, but when they click on the title they will see our existing article. So, the person is still helped
Wow Krystle, that’s actually a pretty good solution.Takes a little time, but still a good solution. I did have a question about that though, so you “write” the article and the person (possibly) will be notified. Will the articles title then get taken off of the requests list, since it’s already “written”? Trying to make wikiHow a better place, Max
Oh goody, off to work then!
I wrote an article based on a request, and I can see that the request is still there. Can you fix it? The article is Tell Parents About a Bad Test Score.
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