http://www.wikihow.com/Embarrass-Your-Ex-on-Facebook
1) How is this not mean spirited under our deletion guidelines? Some of this is not “toying with your ex in a playful way”, it’s completely unacceptable, borderline-stalkerish, not-even-borderline-bullying behaviour. Why don’t we just go around and teach kids how to harass other kids at school and how to sexually harass people at work while we’re at it? _I didn’t molest those kids, I just toyed with their asses in a playful way._2) What the fuck was Goldenzebra Krystlesmoking to think making this a featuredarticle would be a good idea
[? Some of the points from the talk page:
Indeed. ]( http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=Discussion:Embarrass-Your-Ex-on-Facebook&diff=prev&oldid=7242763
)
Wholeheartedly agree with every single letter in this entire post.
system
3
While I don’t agree with the tone of this post, I have doubts that I support the FA of this particular article. With the amount of discussion and encouragement to stop bullying (especially targeted towards kids and teens), this is pretty much a “gutter” opposite of what is being taught in today’s society. It may be fun and games to diss someone behind their back, but to take it to the next level & spend quality time blasting someone you have gone out with on a public social networking website is pretty immature and low. You’re out of the relationship, fine. But don’t dangle someone else’s feelings and mess with them.
This article was offensive enough to me to get me to create an account on WikiHow just so I can post this comment. WHY DO WE HAVE TO WAIT 2 WEEKS TO DELETE? Seriously - this should be removed as a featured article immediately and deleted today. I’ve had WikiHow’s feed in my reader for several years, but lately the featured articles are making my finger twitch over the “remove” button. WikiHow is awesome - but this article is horrible.
Jordan
5
I respectfully support nominating this article for deletion as “mean spirited”. I’m not going to specifically point anyone out but like some have said, this article just further aggregates the problem of online bullying and generally being immature and disrespectful of one’s personal wishes (in this case, embarrassing an ex-significant other via social networking). Just reading the very negative feedback alone gets me concerned about our readership and what people feel better about reading, not learning how to take advantage of someone.
system
6
Hey all, I make the final call on what gets featured and what doesn’t, so I take full responsibility for this. Goldenzebra (our intern, Zareen) just applies the FA templates. When I approved this I really didn’t think it was any more “mean spirited” than articles like: How to Be a Gold Digger (with Pictures) - wikiHow Fun
How to Lie (with Pictures) - wikiHow
How to Break Up a Couple (with Pictures) - wikiHow
How to Love a Married Man: 16 Things to Know
3 Ways to Make Your Ex Boyfriend Jealous - wikiHow Life
These are all very likely to be personally hurtful things. But historically we’ve always steered away from trying to be a “moral barometer” and have deleted topics that we decide, as a community, are clearly abusive, and allowed our readers to decide what to do with articles in the gray area. Do I approve of the topic personally? No–I wouldn’t do this to any of my exes
I do think it is “mean” but I don’t think it’s “abusive” which is more of what I think of when it comes to NFD|mea (I’ve always been concerned about the subjectivity of the word “mean”). So, I’m not sure what the question is here - whether the article should have been featured, or whether it should be deleted? I do think that any article which abides by our deletion policy is fair game to feature, but as to whether the article should be deleted, that’s up to you guys. The article was published recently, boosted, and passed by the eyes of five community members without being nominated for deletion. We can’t delete the article while it’s already in the featured mix, though, because that will break the Google widget, among other things. I’m removing the NFD notice for now, since we always try to keep article templates off articles while they are on the home page, but let’s keep this discussion going here and restore the NFD template when the article falls off the home page.
@Metsguy234
We’ve had it in the forums, many times in the past. It always ends with me asking people to put the RSS feed on their watchlist, so if they have a concern about an article coming up for featuring (they are scheduled at least a week in advance) they can send me an e-mail and we can reconsider it before the article goes live in all our channels. Here’s a link to the RSS feed: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:RSS-feed
system
8
None of those are FA’s
My concern was mainly because the hike of cyberbullying, teen suicides, and other issues in the past year, 2-3 years, or so kind of contradicts the purpose.
system
9
“How to Lie” was, but I guess that comes back to one of my questions - if an article doesn’t violate our deletion policy, why shouldn’t it have the potential to be featured? But yeah, I get your point - how it was scheduled in proximity to a recent FA about bullying, I can see how that was in poor taste, and I apologize for that. I’ll try to be more cognizant of that in the future.
OK, fixed that.
Eh, by definition, if you’re trying to embarrass somebody you’re trying to make other people think less of them and if that’s not abusive then nothing short of actual physical violence against a person is
.
I don’t agree. Featured articles are meant to be the very best of wikiHow, and will be seen as the wikiHow and the wikiHow community endorsing such activities
. If they’re things that no person in their right mind would do, I can see a case for keeping them, but not for promoting them to tens or hundreds of thousands of people.
And I rolled you back (wikis are super), for the reason above: It needs to be clear that this is a controversial and unpopular article in the wikiHow community
so it doesn’t reflect badly on us all.
Jordan
11
What concerns me the most are comments like these:
I totally understand that there can be a difference between an article covering something likely to be hurtful as opposed to something that can be abusive. But it bothers and concerns me that we might be losing readers and credibility over several featured articles of this nature in close timing.
Yes, I think “Embarrass Your Ex” should be deleted when that becomes possible. Yes, I think it should be removed from Featured status ASAP. Krystle, if you can’t see the difference between the standards of what is permissible and what should be featured, then you don’t know the difference between a D- and and A+. And in this case, if you look at the examples you listed, the difference is that while all the others are likely to hurt someone on the way to gaining what you want, this one’s PRIMARY OBJECTIVE IS TO HURT SOMEONE. You should have seen that. The greater problem is the suggestion that the entire community needs to police these articles as they come up for consideration for FA. What we really need is a person or group choosing FA that is more in sync with the community (in other words, exhibits better decision-making in our collective opinion). My suggestion would be to include a approve/disapprove voting option for all FAs, so that over time there’s a clear record of where the vetting group makes choices significantly different from the viewers. And if the accumulated record shows that a person is repeatedly making bad decisions for FA, that person could be counseled or replaced.
Caidoz
13
In all of your examples (other than How to Lie, which I don’t personally consider mean spirited as there are many valid reasons for telling a lie.) the person the mean spirited behaviour is directed at is still very much in control of the situation. In the case of this article, however, the person is being publicly humiliated, leaving them completely out of control of how the situation progresses. When an article is nothing more than a guide to bullying, it should definitely fall under our deletion guidelines. Teenagers can be unbelievably cruel, and this kind of guidance could easily lead to a situation with a tragic ending.
While I would normally support this, considering the reactions of our readers I feel it may be better to make an exception here and leave the NFD tag in place, with a note at the top of the discussion page acknowledging that the article should not have been featured and explaining why it cannot be removed. It is apparent from the discussion page, the comment here from Quangdog, and the reactions on twitter that the featuring of this article has lost us a lot of respect from our readers, and if we want to regain it, it may help to show that we have taken the complaints about the featuring of this article seriously.
I agree that this probably isn’t worth an FA… By the way, does anyone have any idea about what “Flex Your Happiness Muscle” is about?
It seems just about anything can make a Featured Article these days. I was surprised, quite frankly, that a RuneScape article made it up there a couple of weeks ago, but it was pretty well-written. It’s just that this selection process may require a bit more thought.
This is a serious fail in the process. If a mistake like this has been made, it should be reversible. But if it truthfully can’t be deleted while featured, then it should still be possible to (1) de-feature it now
, and then (2) delete it when due process has run its course.
system
16
I think there’s a cliff between favoritism of the opposition of the FA and favoritism of deleting the article plain out. Re-categorizing articles all the time, I do have to favor with Krystle on the amount of articles on wikiHow that aren’t really in “taste” of what some people would call ‘fashionable’ (as far as the breaking people up, marriages up, etc on purpose). I don’t see a purpose of deleting the article straight up for this reason.
I support the immediate removal of this article from FA status. We can immediately delete the tweets, Facebook and G+ links to this article that were made from the wikiHow account. I know there are cache issues which make immediate removal from the home page and RSS feed difficult, but as soon as those pass we should try to remove it from there as well. A post regarding the selection of FAs in general is forthcoming…
Thanks, Jack. In fairness to Krystle, she does a lot of things, and that mathematically increases the odds of her doing something terrible/unpopular compared to someone who doesn’t.
Another first-time poster here. This issue really gets to me; I hate bullying. I’ve enjoyed many of your how-tos before; not this one.
The difference is that the FA in question endorses BULLYING. Breaking up a couple… sure that can be mean-spirited - but the real issue is that an article that sets out to “put your ex into purgatory” is straightforward bullying. It also advocates stalking and slander. I’m astonished that after unanimous
condemnation, the article itself hasn’t been edited to reflect that. A banner at the top that states the article has received a number of complaints and is under review, condemns bullying and apologises for offence caused by this FA, would go a long way towards maintaining wikihow’s standards and reputation. That said, I support the immediate removal of the article. A warning/disclaimer is the very
least we can do, and as I understand the issues before us it won’t cause any widget issues. So why wait? As I am not familiar with your process, I won’t be making such an edit myself. The howto: make a change on wikihow says that I should post in the forum and that good ideas will be taken up.
Agreed, Lewis. I don’t have a problem with Krystle - she’s just the representative of WikiHow here, and everyone makes mistakes. I’m still disturbed by the official response. The discussion on all forums has been universally negative, and every second this article remains featured continues to shame us all, but both Krystle and Eric seem to be hiding behind policy instead of saying “Yeah, we screwed up and we’re trying to fix it right now.” The little “controversial” line that’s been added to the FA isn’t sufficient. It’s like a false page 1 headline in the newspaper - with a retraction in small print at the bottom of page 17.
