I wanted to let everyone know about a little update expected soon in how we gather input from anons to help us improve articles. The short version is: We’re trying to use the Helpfulness system to give logged-out readers a better feedback experience than what they get on Discussion pages.
Now here’s the long version!
Anyone who does a lot of patrolling on wikiHow knows that Discussion pages can be a bit of a dead zone for feedback. Obviously, many community members do use these pages constructively: for example, to discuss the merits of an NFD, to talk about what needs doing on an article before it can go live, and to collaborate on making improvements to the topic… and none of that is changing any time soon! However, when it comes to participation by logged-out folks, many Discussion pages are just targets for spam and trolling. The bummer about this is that when an anonymous reader *does* have some good feedback about the topic they’ve read, it tends to get lost in the shuffle. Readers are left with a potentially bad experience: they go to give feedback but just find a page of spam or jokes, and then their comment doesn’t even get acted upon. It’s a bummer! This is what we’d like to change
Truth be told, Discussion pages are a bit of a relic. They existed before our engineers built the Helpfulness feedback and Tech feedback systems (as well as image and Q&A flagging). Those systems are now pretty well developed, and the ratings and written feedback we get from readers there drive a ton of our efforts, both at the wikiHaus and in the community. The input there helps make us better - and we all act on it much more than we do on random Discussion page comments (which are often not even seen by the people who could fix the issues being raised). Discussion pages also present some technical problems, because despite being de-indexed, they make it look to search engines like we have a bunch of really poor pages on our site that won’t help readers at all.
With all that context in mind, our engineers are planning to harness the Helpfulness feature to improve our flow for anon feedback. If you click on “Discuss” as a logged-out reader, you’ll get a prompt similar to our Helpfulness question from the bottom of the page. You’ll then be able to vote on whether the article helped you or not, and give more detailed feedback, just like the current bottom-of-page experience. Their rating will contribute to the Helpfulness score on the page, and their feedback will then go into the Helpfulness widget to inform future editors about how the article can be improved. This’ll often make bold editing and NFD review easier, too, in that all the feedback is in one place, so boosters and admins won’t have to click around so much!
Logged in, the user experience won’t change - you can still use Discussion pages to discuss topics or improvements, as ever. In fact, the pages may evolve to be more serious places of wiki discussion, now that they’ll be less of a magnet for spam and trolling.
Once the change is made (potentially tomorrow, but if not, in the next few days) and you get a chance to see it in action for a while, let us know what you think. It’s a potentially evolving update, but one hopefully taking us in the right direction to help readers see how and where to submit their feedback so we can act on that consolidated feedback more easily!
