Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for October 21st:
What’s happening?
More article format experiments are underway! The content team is creating some articles that answer a range of questions related to a specific topic. Each method will talk to a different question. You can see an example of this format here
and here
.
With this second article, readers were traditionally unhappy with the original article, because it isn’t something that can technically be done. Changing the title to “Can You Get Cydia Without Jailbreaking? Facts & Alternatives” helps reflect this, and talks to the audience’s pain points and offers alternative solutions in a succinct way.
Another experiment is a medical format that can be seen in this
article. This format allows the article to cover a range of important information pertinent to the topic - such as the causes and symptoms - without needing to try and fit into specific steps and action verbs! It gets a lot of important information across to the reader in a way that’s easy to digest.
Who’s working on it?
Carrie and the content team.
What’s the goal of this?
The idea of these particular experiments is to give authors more freedom and flexibility to present educational and instructional information in ways that align with reader expectations, and helps our readers find the information they need quickly. With our traditional format, in some cases, it can be a little awkward to present information clearly because of the style guidelines. This way, authors are able to be a little more creative with their presentation and in turn be more helpful to readers. The great thing with these new formats is that we are still moving our mission forward and accomplishing the goal to teach anyone how to do anything.
If you know of any articles that might benefit from a makeover with one of these different styles, feel free to either bring it to myself or Chris H, or make some tweaks yourself, and then we can help adjust any display titles or formatting as needed. These experiments aren’t just contained to the wikiHaus team - we’d love it if you want to try them out as well!
You may have noticed:
wikiHow namespace pages have been updated to be responsive. This covers all pages that start with wikihow.com/wikiHow:
If you happen to notice anything unusual on a wikiHow namespace page, please post it here
.
You may have noticed:
This week the wikiHow team launched the new Zoom for Beginners course. If you’d like to check out this course, feel free to send me an email on jayne@wikihow.com
and I can send you a special link to access it
