Hi! I have noticed that the number of requests we have on wikiHow, (as of 5:03 PM mountain time 6/6/11) is 454,484! (Four hundred fifty four thousand four hundred eighty four) I believe this number to be inaccurate, as it is higher than the total number of articles we have on wikiHow. ((111,862)) If someone could fix it, it would be most appreciated, however if this number IS in fact accurate, (which I don’t believe it to be) than could some people please start working on answering requests? If all current requests are answered, (provided this number is accurate, which I don’t believe it to be) we will have over 500,000 articles! However, like I said before, I believe this number to be inaccurate. The problem may be that the Answer a Request section needs a little change. Go here for details. http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/comment/7704/#Comment_7704
system
2
Any rush to it? Anyways, the “suggested requests” is just a small part of ideas to write about. http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Twitter-to-Generate-Article-Ideas-for-wikiHow
http://www.wikihow.com/Find-a-Subject-to-Write-About-at-wikiHow
http://www.wikihow.com/Find-a-Theme-to-Write-About-And-Avoid-Duplication
http://www.wikihow.com/Get-a-wikiHow-Train-of-Thought
Any part of writing an articles comes with research. If you don’t like to do research, then it’s going to be harder for you to write an article in the first place. For those whom say, “There’s a bazillion things in the suggestion requests, but they’re all too hard”, don’t use it & think about something that you’re more comfortable with.
@Maluniu
- could you explain your post further? Do you mean that we don’t need requests, or that not everyone needs to answer requests? I’m a little confused.
system
4
I’m actually referring to Elocina’s forum thread here: http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/935/what-stops-you-from-answering-requests
. Majority of the people, including Andrew have said that they don’t know about the subject or not of interest. Little to be known, WRM adores writing articles based upon suggested requests or articles that aren’t popular to write about.
One reason the number is so high is because a lot of the requests are repeats (meaning they were already written before the request was made). Getting your request answered through that is like winning the lottery.
Mostly what I am saying is that I don’t believe that there are really 450,000 requests.
Why even keep those in the “Answer A Request” section at all? If they do get written, then they’ll just be marked with {{nfd|dup}}. Excellent point, @WikiRicardo
.
@Maluniu
, the number of requests in the "Answer a Request section is at large. It has much to many articles for one person to write. I believe this number to be inaccurate, as it is more than we have written on wikiHow all together. It may be partially the fault of duplicate article requests, as stated above. This may be partially considered a bug report. Feel free to move this if you think it is in the wrong category.
system
7
Who, in your opinion, do you think should clean the potential duplicates up in the database? I’m curious about that.
I believe that he thinks that the staff, or the admins, could do it. This is an annoying problem.
@Maluniu
- Okay, thanks for clearing that up. Why couldn’t the staff do it? They could just code the change, and delete all duplicate requests. Or would they have to do it manually?
Harri
10
@Twoscompany
There are seemingly hundreds of thousands of requests, and each one would have to be looked at to see if it has a duplicate. It’s probably not a very quick task!
system
11
The list of requests is accurate, and probably far from complete. Our goal is to build the world’s largest how-to manual, and there are millions of things we have yet to teach people how to do. We allow everything from the most general of topics (How to Walk) to the most specific of categories - just yesterday I came across http://www.wikihow.com/Smoke-a-Cigarette-in-Paris
. I don’t smoke and I don’t recommend it, but I was really impressed by how well the person wrote an article on *such* a specific topic! As for duplicates, I am addressing that in a separate thread. It is hard to pin down the problem without specific examples. Yes, there are duplicates in the list of requested topics, but we have many ways duplicates can be avoided: 1. All requests are approved/rejected by admins. That means if a new request is made that the admin recognizes as a duplicate, it is rejected. 2. When a person writes an article, the system shows them a list of potential existing duplicates, and the reader is asked to contribute to the existing article, rather than create a new one. Many times, though, the system is inaccurate, or the writer totally ignores the list
If they do mark one of the articles on the list as a duplicate, though, it goes on the list of “proposed redirects” which an admin reviews ( @Luv_Sarah
is really good at this) and if they are in fact duplicates, a redirect is created and the title is pulled out of the requests database. 3. If a duplicate does end up getting written, instead of being deleted it can be redirected to the duplicate title. This is rarely done though because a redirect is like death to a distinct topic. If you create a redirect between two titles that do not mean *exactly* the same thing, one of those topics might never get written, ever. So it’s not a perfect system, but what is?
Steve5
12
Sorry for bumping this but i’ve noticed a few requested aarticles about “Poetry Out loud” and theres this compition for a thing called “Poetry Outloud” and I was wondering if there’s any way I could figure out which one the Requested wanted someone to write about. If its the compition thing called “Poetry Out Loud” I entered it last year and know several things about it. ~Steve
Try doing a search here: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:ListRequestedTopics
. This should contain all 400,000+ requests here.
