The Tips Patrol App has exceeded over 100,000 tips. This is quickly turning into an unfixable overload emergency. Either something must be done about it on the wikiHaus’s part, or the community must give special attention to that app.
Hailey
2
That might mean more bad tips that have to be deleted. I’ll try to help out with the Tips Patrol more often.
I don’t like Tips Patrol that much. It takes more than too much time to patrol through or delete one single tip, and with over 100,000 tips to weed through, I’d rather pass on that opportunity. Sorry.
system
4
We need to be realistic, these are not actually hurting anything, so it doesn’t need to be addressed as an emergency, just another area of concern.
I’d have to +1 this. I’ll try to help out with Tips Patrol when I can, and when I have time, but I can’t promise I’ll do it very often because I’ll need to make time for other volunteer activities that I normally do in my wikiHow days
Exactly. Just because we have a number on the problem doesn’t mean it’ll kill wikiHow. Just as with the NAB backlog, is it a problem? Yes. Is it the only thing to be worked on? No. So no matter what task you’re doing, improving wikiHow is improving wikiHow.
system
7
One thing makes tips patrol different from NAB or Recent changes is the fact the content isn’t live onsite, tipspatrol content is in a queue awaiting acceptance, new articles that haven’t been boosted or edits that haven’t been patrolled are part of what a visitor experiences when they come to wikiHow, so, to me at least, NAB and patrolling are actually more important tasks.
Because Tips Patrol is a pre-approved thing (it wouldn’t appear on the site until the tip has been approved by an editor), IMHO, I actually view the app as something I can do casually on my phone while traveling (reviewing the tip and using skip and delete), rather than sitting down with a laptop and sifting through tips as such, when there’s a lot more important tasks that I can do with a keyboard.
I agree with all you’re saying, and I appreciate your comments. However, the issue with tips patrol is that even
with three layer to get through, bad tips still get in, and more are coming every day.
Oh is it. I am going straight way for this. Thanks for telling that.
system
11
Yeah, but that’s just something that comes along with more publicity. Not ideal, no, but there’s no way to fix it immediately. BR and Maluniu both made good points; I guess I forgot about that till now. :3
This may point to an training issue. Maybe the best thing to do is look at ways to improve the documentation that new tips patrollers get. In addition, when you see that bad tips get through, are you able to find the person that approved those tips? If so, do you get in touch with them to provide coaching. I think it would help to see some examples here, so if you come across any while patrolling, please post the diffs. Maybe there’s a pattern of common mistakes.
@Elocina
It depends on where you are in the layers. If you’re in QG, you can see who approved it. If it got through QG and is in RC, you can see who approved it in QG, but not originally.
system
14
I still think some examples of common problematic tips would help. Sometimes, rather than just saying “this is an emergency” it’s best to give specific examples in order to demonstrate why something is a problem. In this case, what constitutes a “bad tip”?
By my definition, a bad tip is one that is unrelated to the article (so many of those), or has poor grammar and sentence structure, or tips that are common sense and simplistic. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Examples: Tried to kick John out did ya | (from “Revise for Your GCSEs”) This was a great help! | (from “Make a Simple Banana Smoothie”) You no if u use this you are the best because it is easy good and pretty the prittiest is the 1 | (from “Draw a Cupcake”) ------------------------------------------------------------------------- There’s probably about 100+ of these for every good tip.
system
18
I’m confused as to where this thread is going. Since there are 100 (or 1,000) bad tips for every good tip, many people are saying that 1.) it’s not worth their time (which some of us have been saying since the inception of the tool) and 2.) there are higher priorities on the site that involve actual bad edits, like patrolling, where bad tips can actually be removed from articles, not a queue of “tips” that haven’t been placed on articles yet, let alone made it past the first layer of elimination. @WritingEnthusiast14
the examples you gave are tips that were deleted in Tips Patrol, as they should have been. These tips never hit an article, so what’s the fuss? If you are concerned about tips actually making it to articles (which is the real problem), you need to find examples of tips that were wrongly approved in Quality Guardian that were also patrolled in RC Patrol. The editors who approved the tips in both places can be coached on the quality that is expected of tips that are to be approved in QG and subsequently, the patroller who approved it in RCP. In short, the issue of bad tips reaching articles has little to do with the 100,000 Tips Patrol backlog and more with the next two layers, where editors are actually placing and approving these tips to live articles.
@Isorhythmic
It’s not that I’m extremely
concerned about the bad tips reaching the article. It the concerning of the time it consumes to eliminate all the bad tips and filter out the (few) good ones. The backlog has grown by almost 10,000 - 15,000 tips in only less than a month, which is far worse than the NAB backlog.
I disagree with this. IMO, the NAB backlog is worse than the tips patrol backlog because many articles in NAB are often low-quality and NFDs and risk lowering the overall quality of the site. It’s perfectly acceptable to reject more tips than to accept them; even if the tips are crappy, it doesn’t affect the article’s quality in a large way. Based on this, I actually think the tips patrol backlog has a lower priority than other backlogs.
