Thanks to the new NAB (New Article Boost) we can now easily “demote” low quality / incomplete articles instead of deleting them. It’s far more “wiki” to demote an incomplete article to give it a chance to develop. It’s also less discouraging to new authors who lose heart when they get a NFD tag (nomination for deletion) on their new page. So I’m going to make a “bold edit” to one of our tools and simply remove the button to NFD|inc from the tool for a month to see what happens. For the next month, if you want to NFD|inc something in NAB, just press “demote” instead. Full details to my (crazy?) plan below. For the first 2 years of wikiHow we intentionally did not delete any new articles due to low quality or incompleteness. Not deleting bad articles! Can you imagine
?! Here is the 2005 era deletion policy in case you are curious: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=wikiHow:Deletion-Policy&oldid=44304
Our wiki spirited philosophy was that incomplete articles were just pre-stubs that needed time to develop into real stubs and eventually full articles. It wasn’t until 2007, that a long forum discussion lead to the early creation of the concept of deleting low quality, “incomplete” articles. Here was the change to the policy page: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=wikiHow:Deletion-Policy&diff=614506&oldid=510663
It was a controversial change though and 5 days later the policy change was reverted as you can see here: http://www.wikihow.com/index.php?title=wikiHow:Deletion-Policy&diff=622294&oldid=614531
It took another 7 months of discussion (7 months!) before a community consensus for deleting incomplete articles was obtained and {{nfd|inc}} was finally added as an acceptable reason for deletion. Fast forward to 2015: wikiHow is a large, popular and trusted reference source. Readers rely on us to be accurate and helpful. So we now recognize we need to hide low quality articles from our readers. We used to have to take the slightly un-wiki approach of deleting low quality articles as incomplete, but now we can just “demote” them in NAB. Both deletion and demotion hide articles from readers. Demotion has the very pro-wiki advantage of giving articles a chance to develop. I can tell you from the 2005-2007 era of wikiHow, even the worst, most incomplete articles do sometimes develop into featured articles. It takes timeBy putting an nfd|inc on an article, we never give the article enough time to develop. We also discourage new authors who often write low quality articles as they are still learning how wikiHow works. So I’m going to remove the nfd|inc option from the dropdown menu in NAB for one month. While in NAB and you feel the urge to NFD|inc something. Just press “demote” instead. If you really, really feel the need to NFD|inc something in NAB, you can always add the {{nfd|inc}} tag manually, old school style. It will still work. Let’s see what happens for a month. After a month let’s open a full discussion on the forums to decide if we should re-add the NFD|inc button back in NAB. My hunch is that after a month most of us won’t miss the Nfd|inc button. Our readers still won’t find any low quality new articles. Our new authors won’t get as discouraged. And quite possibly we will give some very low quality new articles a chance to grow into a fully featured articles. It’s a worthy one month experiment. At some future point, we will probably want to set up a system that deletes demoted articles that haven’t been edited for a long, long time. How long do you think a demoted article should sit before we consider deleting it? What are your thoughts? Do you think this is a worthy one month experiment?
I think this is a great compromise!
Lojjik
3
One way I could conceive of handling a (potentially) large number of demoted articles is this: If a demoted article sits longer than one month without any edits, knock it into NFD Guardian for review automatically (but not going to Advanced guardian if it gets re-added to the queue)
This is definitely a thought provoking concept @Jack-Herrick
! Though I don’t usually mark any articles for inc, it’ll be interesting to see how this turns out. Maybe in the future we can try this on some other nfd reason? (nfd|cha maybe?)
Great idea Jack! It is so much more encouraging and can provide editors with a great sense of determination. Absolutely love the new NAB as well Jack!
@Lojjik
+1 I think what Lojjik said is a great idea. I personally don’t use nfd|inc all that much, but if we could demote it instead of deleting an article it will a lot better for the authors self-confidence. Getting an article deleted may make potential future articles non-existent.
Good to hear that folks don’t think this is too crazyThis change is now live! Let’s check in a month and see if this caused any unforeseen disasters
