1

While I generally like the idea of the welcome bot, I’m noticing that there are many, too many, welcome messages inviting people to start contributing in the special patrols. The reason I have a problem with this is that most of these people are transparently green. The vast majority of people will ignore the tutorial and the writer’s guide and crack off an article that looks like it was written by a third grader. “Wanna learn how to cook a potato? dont use too much heat.” is not an article, nor is it an introduction. When I go to this person’s talk page I find that there is no welcome message like we used to use, and there is an invitation to get involved in the tips patrol before they are mature enough to appreciate an article and take a little pride in their own creation. We need to get people familiar with walking- the writer’s guide and the editing basics- before we give them the car keys.

2

I agree with Davjohn. Inviting new users to the Tip Patrol Tool when they have no experience is not something we should be doing, because a lot of article will have poor quality tips approved, and others will have very good tips rolled back. Remember: To fix a problem, we first have to figure out what the problem is.

3

Mmhmm; I was noticing while patrolling there were an awful lot of new tip patrollers…*Very new*, as in, got the link from the welcome message they had recieved. It kinda makes the RC shoot up too; with so many un-needed tips, below quality standards (and I know we have {{tipspatrol}} to help out, too). In short…I agree with Davjohn. June Days

4

I agree with everything above. It was a lot easier when it had the link to Quality Guardian instead of Tip Patrol. Tip Patrol is more advanced, while QG is more straightforward - “Does this picture/video match? Yes or no.” But I guess if we’re still bent on putting TP in there, we should at least put the link in explaining how to do it first.

5

Adding two links, one to teach them how to use the TP app, and the second link to the actual app, might just be “too much” for someone who just joined wikiHow. Instead, we can switch back to QG or link them to the community dashboard.

6

I second this.

7

I also agree that new users shouldn’t be steered immediately and directly toward TP, especially before seeing the links for the Writer’s Guide and wikiHow tour. Some people are being set up to fail, because as @Davjohn noted, they don’t know our format & policy. Incidentally, the hey can you spell check welcome message is the one that prompted me to start editing, so I suggest reverting to that one.:smiley:

8

I can see inviting them to ADD tips… with someone else screening for quality later on… but PATROLLING of any sort by complete newbies makes me quite nervous!

9

I really don’t have a problem with people getting involved, in fact, I encourage it, but I’m even a little shaky with the Quality Guardian. It may be simple, but I would rather the welcome invite the new editors go to the tutorial and the writer’s guide. With comfort they can get into editing basics and the advanced editing basics. wikiHow will be much better served as knowledge morphs into experience.

10

Although we try not to overwhelm new users with lots of links, I think these ones would help get them started. - wikiHow tour (already linked) - Writer’s Guide - http://www.wikihow.com/Contribute-to-wikiHow

11

Yeah, actually when I made my account bout a month ago I didn’t make the intelligent move to read the tutorials. Instead I just went off and started tapping away at my keyboard. I still have little patrol dude messages that I like to look back on and laugh at but, really, I could’ve done some damage. For some it takes a while to figure out certain parts of things and even though I’m all for learning from your mistakes you shouldn’t have an excessive number of Patrol Coaches calling you out. I don’t really like the idea of someone just learning what wikihow is and having the welcome bot say they need to start patrolling other people’s edits… Really all I can see is to do as Rosejuice said and at least put the Tutorial first and maybe make it a little more straightforward for our less experienced and/or younger editors. As wikihow gets more popular more people will come. Some will catch on and some won’t but the only way to help them out is to encourage them to read the tutorials. If we keep going like we’re going then we may get a little bit flustered with all of the novice edits…

12

When I first joined wikiHow I didn’t read the Writer’s guide nor the Tutorial but just went straight to patrolling edits. Luckily I skipped about 75% of them and just patrolled what I was absolutely certain about (grammar, punctuation, spelling, capitals, vandalism etc.)

13

@Krystle - tagging you in here for your input on the possibility of removing the Tip Patrol from welcoming messages.

14

Neither did I. The first thing I did when I first joined was to use the image picker tool. I really support the idea of removing the ‘invite’ to use the tips patrol tool from the welcome message, since new users don’t really understand how to do this.

15

This is a suggestion that comes up often…that we should get new members to read about wikiHow and how it works *before* they start contributing. The issue is that as much as we would like people to stop putting the carriage before the horse, the reality of human nature is that most people like to learn by doing. That’s a big part of what makes wikiHow fun and inviting. You get to dive in and help out! In the past we used to have a welcome message that was full of links on how to use wikiHow properly. What happened is the 99% of people don’t click on them. Instead, they decide not to contribute at all. With this current message, we have a link to the wikiHow tour. I’ve been tracking these links, and most people do not click on them. We can’t force them to read them. What we can do is encourage them to contribute, and then coach them on how to be better contributors. @Isorhythmic started out spellchecking. @Confusionist didn’t read the introductory materials. @CudlyCake jumped right into patrolling. @Love2 started off using image adder. These are all awesome contributors who might not have stuck around if we hadn’t given them the opportunity and encouragement to start helping out immediately. And back then, there were many community members saying we should NOT encourage new contributors to use these tools, just like many people are saying about tips patrol. With any “easy entry” tool, whether it’s image picker, spellchecker, or tips patrol, we will always have a large number of newbies who need coaching. But that’s the thing, and that is why we are a community and not just a pure content site like eHow. We have people to review each other’s edits and teach each other how to be better contributors. Tips Patrol actually has two layers of quality control: first the tips are reviewed by tips patrollers, then the approved tips are reviewed by recent changes patrollers. This is a more thorough review than we give all other edits on wikiHow. That being said, I understand the sentiment. I know it’s a pain to see those people who use the tool improperly and ignore the coaching. These are people who apparently don’t want to learn how to use the tool properly; if they ignore the coaching, they probably would not have read the intro links in the welcome message either! But to discourage ALL people from using the tool just because some stubborn people won’t listen is like saying we should not allow anyone to edit wikiHow because some people are vandals. We shouldn’t let some people ruin it for everyone. Our philosophy has always been to let people try and help out, assume good faith, and if they mess up, we coach them. We teach them. And if they keep ignoring us, we keep coaching them until they lose interest (or if they’re insistent on editing poorly, we might even block them). Personally, I’ve seen so many good contributors become a part of our community by starting out on a newbie tool, without reading the instructions first. Many of those people (like the ones I mentioned earlier) have become enormous assets here and I think they outweigh the drawback of having some people who don’t use the tools as well as we’d like. Those people tend to lose interest pretty quickly, but the few people who “get it” stick around and make wikiHow so much better. With all that being said (sorry!) I see that the tips patrol tool has very few tips left to review, and we don’t want to direct new people to do something that there isn’t much left of to do, so I changed the welcome message. Now it directs people to spellchecker, but there is still a link to the wikiHow tour, which links pretty much to how to do everything on wikiHow:slight_smile: