Anna
1
Hey folks! We’ve got a couple more feature announcements today. The engineers have been working on some cool new things that will hopefully make the wikiHow experience better for everyone: RCP Tour
We all know how vital Recent Changes Patrol is to wikiHow, and how valuable quality patrollers are here - patrolling is the frontline of the wiki! The whole process can, as a new contributor, be pretty confusing at first, too. So @Jordansmall
with help from code from the Wikimedia Foundation Growth Team has been working on a simple tour/tutorial for new patrollers, and we’re really excited about its potential to help folks find their feet with the tool. Now, when a new contributor opens RCP for the first time, they’ll be fed right into an interactive tour. This tour uses a similar set of examples and feedback to the RC Coach, but gives the new contributor directions about how to do their first 4 patrols and provides feedback along the way. We know that no tutorial or tour can cover all of the nuances of RCP - the best way to learn all the ins and outs will still be from friendly feedback from experienced patrollers. But we’re hoping that this tutorial strikes a balance in being helpful and informational about basic patrolling, without scaring anybody off from the task! If you want to check it out, please do! You can get looped into the Tour yourself with this link: RCP Tour
. Just beware that you’ll need to click all the way through to stop it from popping up next time you go to RCP (it’s designed to pick up where you left off) - but don’t worry, it’s only a few clicks
Tips Coach
Tips Patrol involves a lot of weeding out low quality tips, and for new Tips patrollers, especially, it can be tricky to know which ones to publish and which to edit or delete. A few months ago, we made a change to Tips Patrol to funnel approved tips through Quality Guardian, which has really helped prevent any unhelpful tips from getting onto our articles. You all may also have seen the idea of a “Tips Coach” being kicked around in the forums in the past, and now, thanks to some great engineering by @Arguitier
, it’s here! This feedback tool should help new Tips Patrollers get an idea of which kinds of tips are good to add and which what aren’t so helpful. Tips Coach will work similar to the RC Patrol Coach in displaying a message to the contributor after they add or delete a test tip - it will give them some specific feedback on the ideal choice for that scenario, and it will also post to their Talk page for future reference. The tests will be pretty easy to begin with, but there’s room to play with in adding more complicated ones in future depending on how helpful people find it! Right now, the Coach is set up with 15 tests, and each new tips patroller will see those test once each before “graduating” from the Coach (but the progression can be reset if needed). When a contributor doesn’t pass a Tips Coach test, it’s possible to rollback some or all of the tips they have added, so if you see someone adding a lot of lower quality tips that might need to be removed from QG in bulk, let us know! There is also the ability to block someone from Tips Patrol, if need be. Tips Coach will not hit Boosters and Admins as they add tips, so if you want to try it out, be sure it’s on a regular account. And if you see people who get messages from Tips Coach on their Talk page, please feel free to offer some friendly reassurance and help - Getting that message can be a bit daunting, so it wouldn’t hurt to offer some positive follow-up outreach if you see that kind of situation as you’re patrolling or welcoming new people! As always, please try it out and let us know if you see any bugs or problems! Okay folks, that’s all we’ve got for now! I’m hoping you guys are excited by these developments as we are. As always, new features can do unexpected things sometimes, so if you see an effect that doesn’t seem right or have any questions, let us know!
Sounds great! I’m particularly excited about the RCP Tour. Hopefully it will help the new contributors in there starting steps. Kudos to you, engineers! And thanks for keeping us updated, Anna
These are awesome features for new folks. Thanks engineers!
Anna
4
Glad you like them! If you see any intermittence with the RCP Tour availability for now, it’s just while we work out some hitches, so hang in there and it’ll go live for good soon
Tom
5
Absolutely brilliant! Hopefully we should see a slight change in new patrollers to RCP! Big well done to the engineering team who have brought us these great features!
I really like the RCP tour. It seems very helpful. How about an option for a second level (advanced) tour for those interested in finding out more about nuances of often encountered RCP scenarios? Perhaps a checkbox on the last slide to take the advanced tour and one to finish the tour. I am also thinking it might be good to link the RCP tour in the welcome to wikiHow automated greeting. It might help some newcomers overcome the fear of trying RCP and, for other newcomers, it might make accessing the tour multiple times easy.
Anna
7
@Alabaster
Neat idea - I think building an advanced RCP tour could be a good thing at some point! There are definitely more nuances that you learn as you go. It’ll be interesting to see in the next few weeks how having this intro available helps people out, and it’ll probably tell us a lot about what other tour options could be added. I’ll share with the team idea of a second level for future development - thanks! Could be something that those mid-level patrollers get to help them become pros!I’ll go ahead and drop the link into the article on how to patrol recent changes, and the talk templates often used to help coach patrollers - it’s a great idea to make it accessible multiple times!
I loved the new RC coach and tips coach when i tried both of them. It corrected a mistake with great care that there was absolutely no way a patroller feeling would get hurt. I tried it a couple of times just for fun. Thank you engineers for this thoughtful project and more grease to your elbows. Chow
