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Hey, folks!

I wanted to touch base about the new Tech Feedback tool, which you may have noticed appeared on the Dashboard recently. Aaron has been ironing out a few glitches, and it looks like the queue is empty right now (thanks to those of you who’ve jumped in already!), but the tool is fair game for use, if anyone wants to test it out once more feedback rolls in.

As a bit of background, many of you know that keeping technology articles up to date has been a bit of a pain point for wikiHow over the years, what with the constant software updates rolling out for Macs, iPhones, Androids, Windows computers, and all of their respective apps. Having worked on managing our tech content for a period last year, I can testify as to how hard it can be to tell when a tech article needs a total revamp. When we did decide to revamp tech topics, it was often thanks to feedback we received from our readers.

In an effort to improve our editing/updating flow in the tech realm, our developers have made a few changes specifically to tech topics: Instead of being asked “Did this article help you?” readers now see the question, “Is this article up to date?” We tested and then made this switch because we’ve found that there’s often some noise in helpfulness data on tech articles that we can’t control for (a lot of the time, for example, readers will come to an article wanting to do something that’s straight up impossible on their device, and there isn’t much we can do about that). Something we can actually control, however, is whether or not our articles are up to date - we’re hoping that by changing the question we’ll get better feedback on that point from readers.

The new tool comes into play once we gather that feedback: it’ll help us sort through the responses to find the most helpful feedback (and weed out the junk). The aim is to use the good/relevant feedback to prioritize our tech editing/updating and stay ahead of the curve! We hope that this’ll help us get a little bit closer to the goal of having a huge library of tech articles that are consistently reliable for and helpful to our readers.

The tool should function in a pretty straightforward way for the most part: you’ll be presented with a piece of feedback that a reader has left us on an article, and then you’ll be able to vote on whether the feedback is coherent, relevant and specific enough to be used to improve the article. Hopefully, the information we’ll get from this tool will help us know exactly what kind of treatment an article that’s gone slightly (or terribly) out of date needs to be made as helpful as it can be again.

As the tool is still in its beta phase, we’d love to hear what it’s like for you as you play around with it! Always helpful to know what’s working for you and what isn’t.

I hope you guys decide to give it a try as more feedback fills the queue - Again, any thoughts and/or questions on these developments are welcomed!

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Poked around on it for a bit. Seemed fairly straightforward. I’ll jump back to it once the queue goes back up. 

Question though. Is this a vote type thing? Where the feedback has to get (blah) number of votes before being deleted or passed on? Or more like spell patrol where one does it. 

Also, once passed, where does it go from there? 

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Also. Great job Tucker, Aaron, and anyone else who helped build it. Can’t imagine it was easy so cheers! Give yourselves a pat on the back. 

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As a suggestion:

  • When the queue is empty, “remaining” should be “0 remaining”
  • Perhaps the tool can follow the “flow” of existing tools. If it’s empty, it suggests you try another. For example, Picture Patrol when empty says: “Can you help us check categories instead?”

I’d provide more feedback, but the queue is at 0:stuck_out_tongue:

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Ahh glad you had a chance to give it a shot,  @InfernoTerra ! And thanks for the kudos, but this was ALL Aaron and Alissa - I’m just the forum-poster-announcer-guy here - they did all of the hard work:smiley:I’ll pass your thanks along to the both of them though; I know it’ll be very appreciated.

Regarding your questions…

Right now, yes, it’s a vote-based system (where an admin/booster vote count for 2): Once a piece of feedback receives a net score of +2 or -2, the tool will take action on it. Like most of our tools at this stage, this benchmark is fairly experimental, so if we find out at some point that more votes are ideal for us to get a good read on how strong the signal on a piece of feedback is, Aaron and Alissa will tweak it accordingly.

The feedback will still go into the Helpfulness widget (now called the “Tech Page Up-to-Date Data”) for boosters and admins. But if it passes this tool, it’ll also go into our database where the tech team will be able to prioritize tech topics to work on based on the feedback we’re getting.

If anyone else wants to help with a particular niche of tech articles, we can likely provide some of that info out of the database via email, too - so if you let us know what platform you’re interested in, we can let you know what topics in that area need an update. The info is already accessible for boosters/admins in the widget, but if you’re looking specifically for, say, an article on the iPhone that needs updating, we might be able to suggest some, thanks to this tool! Feel free to email me or Anna if that’s something you’re interested in, and we can hopefully hook you up as this tool gathers/triages the feedback that’s coming in.

@Tiagoroth good thinking and thanks for the heads up on those tidbits - I’ll pass them on and hopefully those features can be tweaked. More reviews will roll in bit by bit, hopefully, so you can try it out more then. Thanks!

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@TuckerB :

  • Maybe we should have a form to submit links to outdated/poorly-written articles that require a revision.
  • The vote of an admin/booster is worth 2, right?
  • If a non-admin/booster votes yes on a piece of feedback (taking the score to +1), and the NAB/Admin votes no (taking it to -1), it still requires another vote for the feedback to be denied, right?
  • Admins and boosters should have the option to delete unhelpful/spam feedback directly from the “Tech Page Up-To-Date Data” widget.

@Tiagoroth : Agreed.

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Thanks @Batreeq - all great considerations!

To your first point, we actually used to have a form for that kind of direct tech feedback, but it didn’t end up getting used much so it fell somewhat by the wayside. If you find a topic that needs an update, though, you can always post it on the Seymour-Edits talk page and we’ll pass it on!

Correct re: admin/booster votes!

As far as removing specific feedback, it’s definitely not out of the question we’d change this in the future. That being said, there’s a thought process behind why we would opt not to remove those suggestions. You can read about more about that in older forums posts, like forums.wikihow.com/<wbr>discussion/21201/clearing-a-<wbr>bad-rating</wbr></wbr> . Should offer a bit of context to the mentality behind preserving all the feedback we get, even if not all of it needs acting on:slight_smile:Thanks again for all the helpful feedback.

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Continuing the spirit of the tech feedback feedback, it’d be nice to know what your vote accomplishes like in most other tools. I voted on one, and that was that. Did it disappear? Did someone else vote to keep it? I have no idea

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That could be neat, @Tiagoroth ! We’ll throw that at the devs and see if it’s doable, either now or for V2, depending on where this tool goes from here. I do like seeing those outcomes in NFD Guardian and Picture Patrol and so on, too:slight_smile:

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"I would be using it. Thanks for informing @TuckerB

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@TuckerB - How does the approved notes/feedback get displayed to editors? 

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Hey, @ItsPugle ! Great question. So, we’re still working on coming up with a really efficient way to do that, but for right now, all of the feedback accrued in the tool that’s deemed to be helpful is just noted in the database, and will be pulled by Alissa and sent to the tech team every so often. Editors will be able to act on it from there… Plus, once they know what topics to prioritize, the feedback is accessible from the regular up-to-date/helpfulness widget, too (for the tech team and for admins/boosters). Like I said, though, we’re still trying to figure out the best system as this feature grows, so it’s somewhat of a WIP, and there’ll likely be some changes as this whole thing develops:slight_smile:

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Tech Team? I’m a fair bit out of the wikiLoop, so would someone be kind enough to explain who/what is the Tech Team?

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@ItsPugle haha, of course! I didn’t really mean it as an uppercase/formal “Tech Team” - just the editors at the wikiHaus who focus on tech in particular. Lowercase ‘tech team’:slight_smile:

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Ah okay xD
Good to know:slight_smile:

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@Tiagoroth Just an FYI - Aaron implemented your suggestion, and “remaining” now says “0 remaining” when the tool is out of articles! The suggestion about having votes be visible is also on Aaron & Alissa’s list, but it would take a little more backend work if it ended up getting implemented - so it’ll more likely be considered after some other other tweaks and whatnot have been made, depending on where the tool goes from here:slight_smile:Thanks a lot for participating in this developmental phase.

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@TuckerB : Maybe we should have a conditional “try this” message. For example, clicking “Yes, I’ll patrol pictures” takes me to picture patrol, even when the queue of that is zero. Maybe changes could be made to check if the queue of the suggested tool is zero and if so, suggest something else.:slight_smile:

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@Batreeq This feature already exists in the tool.

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@Tiagoroth : When I go to picture patrol after finishing reviewing tech feedback, it says that the queue for picture patrol is empty.

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@Batreeq , Ah but then it directs you to Category Guardian, and that one has lots to do:slight_smile:

I think it’s possible we may have a request filed somewhere to make the End of Queue message one touch smarter one day, to avoid that extra click - if not, I’ll suggest it. But in the meantime, I think folks do okay finding places to help, so probably not end of the world!