I’d like to share something that we discussed at the London Meetup: the “new article hatchery”. Per earlier forum posts, lots of folks seem excited about the idea of a drive to raise quality for wikiHow’s 10th birthday. Along the lines of a quality drive, one particular idea got a few people pretty excited at the meetup. Background:One of our biggest problems on the site is the New Article Boost queue. Despite the seemingly never ending and heroic work of the NAB team and especially @Ttrimm
over many years, the queue is over 11,000 articles. That is over a year of NAB on our current schedule! Regardless of how hard the NAB team works, the site has grown to the point that the traditional NAB tool cannot catch up with the flood of new articles. Compounding this problem the majority of unNABed new articles are well below wikiHow’s current quality standards. When readers find those articles they think poorly of wikiHow. While deleting those bad articles is good for our quality, it discourages many good faith new authors who don’t yet know how to write well for wikiHow. Sadly we are unintentionally insulting and turning away authors who could grow into good contributors over time for us. I can’t help but think of many of our best contributors through the years who have admitted freely to me that they started off making low-quality or even trolly submissions, before growing into awesome wikiHowians, and who probably would’ve never stuck around if they started today. A solution we discussed in London:The majority of new articles that get published on wikiHow will go into “the Article Hatchery” (tentative name). Articles in the Hatchery will not be findable on search engines or casual browsing on the site. The articles will be fully viewable by anyone as “private links”, but for practical purposes will be hard to find for people other than authors and experienced wikiHow editors. Hatchery articles will also carry a tag that says something like “Hatchery Article: This article has not yet been approved for public viewing on wikiHow. You should not expect that it has met wikiHow’s quality review processes. Click here to learn how to get this article promoted to published status.” Through a variety of tools we will find a way to promote the good articles out of the Hatchery into standard published wikiHow articles. So in essence we will do the opposite of today’s practice: Today we allow all new articles to be publicly published and then look for ones to hide or delete in NAB. Tomorrow we will hide all new articles by default and look for ones to promote to public / published status. Doing this will prevent bad articles from publicly embarrassing us and allow NABers to help people who sincerely want to get their article published rather than spending time deleting junk that has no place on wikiHow. How will we promote articles from the Hatchery to fully published status?There are a variety of tools we could build to do this: 1. We could allow experienced authors with a history of “getting it” have their articles immediately and automatically go to published status. For example, it would be simple to have all admins and NABers have their articles published by default. With some work we could also expand this to folks who have consistently produced rising stars or other good new articles. 2. We could build a thumbs up / thumbs down tool that shows people new articles and asks them a question like “Is this article helpful?” or “Does this meet wikiHow’s quality standards?” or similar. We could promote articles to published status that receive a high percent of yes votes. 3. NABer or admin manual action. Power wikiHow users could have the ability to press a button to promote any article from the Hatchery to published. You could also imagine that a new article help team might form that works with aspiring wikiHow articles that want to have a Hatchery article get published. The help team could help folks understand what needs to happen to the article to reach our standards. This coaching / mentoring dynamic could be awesome for our supportive and friendly community. It’s a lot more fun to help an aspiring new author improve than it is to explain to someone why we are deleting their article! 4. A computer algorithm that could determine which articles look good enough to promote without needing human intervention. What happens to articles that remain in the Hatchery?We will *not* have to think about the Hatchery as a queue we need to work through! An infinite number of articles could sit in the Hatchery forever. We only need concern ourselves with promoting the good ones. For the most part we won’t have to even think about deleting the bad ones. (We may need to make some exceptions and manually delete particularly egregious pages like porn, hate speech, personal attacks, etc.) A long term benefit of all these unpublished articles in the Hatchery is that they could grow into a valuable resource for us. Imagine for example that in 5 years, you want to write an new article or improve an existing one. By searching inside the unpublished articles in the Hatchery you could find perhaps a dozen half baked articles on the exact topic you want to write about. By using the good parts of those articles as raw materials you could make your article that much better. So in time the Hatchery could grow into a valuable library of raw material for writing new articles or improving existing ones. Advantages of the Hatchery system:1. We will dramatically reduce the number of low quality new articles that sit around wikiHow and make some readers think we are not a good site to trust. 2. We will free the NAB team up from the most unpleasant and demotivating parts of NAB. Today NABers spend endless time deleting articles and fixing really poor content that not even the author cares about. Tomorrow NABers could promote and polish only the best articles and coach good faith authors who really want their articles published but need help hitting our quality standards. 3. We will largely solve the pseudo-spam new article problem that is plaguing wikiHow. It’s unlikely that many of these spammy articles would be worthy of promotion. 4. Possibly (and this may not come to pass) the collection of multiple duplicate titles in the Hatchery will be useful as a raw material source for improving or creating new articles in the future. Disadvantages of the Hatchery System:1. This will very likely dramatically decrease the number of new articles created on wikiHow in the short term and potentially the long term. This is a real shame because our goal is to create how to info on every topic. It will slow down our path to this goal as we figure other ways to create good new articles. That said, I think that over time we can figure out ways to solve the number of articles problem. Your feedbackSeveral folks in London were excited about this idea. Others were on the fence, but cautiously optimistic. No one thought we shouldn’t try this. As always we can reverse this decision if it fails. What are your thoughts? Wikimania London folks - Please share your thoughts here as well! @lewis-collard
@deniseke
@zack
@gloster-flyer
@jaob
@ingeborgk
@choicefresh
@martynp
NamingWe brainstormed a lot of names for what to call these articles in the limbo state when we were in London. What name would you prefer? Here is the list from our London brainstorm: 
As for naming, it sounds like Nest Greenhouse would make for a great name. otherwise, this was a bit long. I did get to read most of it. Did have one question: Could the newly created articles still be found on the user’s User page until they’ve been voted through this Greenhouse?
+1 I was also wondering, maybe if another tool was created similar to NAB, and everyone could use it, it would help the backlog a bit? Just an idea though, and open to anyone’s opinion.
Great idea, but bad name. I’d suggest calling it the Article Day Care, myself. Nothing from the brainstorm really stands out to me other than nursery and incubator.
I like this idea. Seems like it would be the best option for the “problem” we currently have. Yes, it’s sad that it might take away the number of articles, but quality above quantity is really not a bad thing. It will also help motivate people to publish higher quality articles so that their articles might be promoted quicker during the nesting stages. On the topic of naming, what about Cradle Greenhouse?
Just one more reason why I wish I went to London! ^^ I vote for the name of “half-baked”; it sounds amazingly creative. It makes me think of a pizza in the oven that is neither frozen nor thoroughly heated. I do not mean to be discouraging, but I love the idea of having Admins, NABers and Featured Authors having their articles automatically published. For very new authors whose articles are not automatically published, we could build a thumbs-up/thumbs-down tool where people could vote on whether a new article is helpful. To add to this idea: If the article is helpful, it would be sent to NAB; if it is not helpful, it would be nominated for deletion and the booster could give the new author tips on writing a good article. Personally I am happy to hear about this system, and I will be even more relieved if it goes live. I do my best to stick to the task because I mostly love doing it, but it’s hard for me to be a power booster when I see a lot of “junk” in NAB, and have a hard time boosting those articles. That’s the reason why I don’t feel comfortable doing a whole lot of boosting in one sitting. In addition, this might be the reason why some new boosters give up after realizing how difficult and disheartening of a task boosting can be (or why they don’t focus so much on boosting as other boosters do). Edit: I can admit that I wrote a jokey article on how to call 911 to fake an emergency (which was my first article ever) when I started (it was nominated for deletion and eventually deleted), but I have learned and come a long way since then.
Lojjik
7
I like the name “Article Incubator”
That and “Article Day Care” are great names! I appreciate everyone else’s ideas, though.
I think this system would be good. I believe, though, that if an article sits in the hatchery for 1 year or so (I’m just throwing out a number) it should be deleted. I also agree that a user should be given “hatcherybypass” rights if they prove themselves to be good contributors. For example, if a valued, well-trusted non-NABer or non-Admin user created a great article, it would be a shame to have it sit in the voting queue for a long time. How would a non-NABer or non-Admin user be promoted? Would a bureaucrat award the right, or could the user (or another user) nominate the user for the rights and a vote by NABs and Admins would take place? All in all, I believe this system would serve wikiHow well, and I can’t wait to see more developments on it.
Lojjik
10
I would imagine, if anything, it would be based on the “featured author” status a user might receive after writing 5 FAs and/or rising stars.
@SudoKing
Either that, or two or three consecutive rising stars/FAs.
WE14 has some great ideas! I think the “hatcherybypass” right would be fair; not all great authors are Admins and Boosters. To add to this idea, people who had a history of writing high-quality articles would receive that right.
Considering how many articles have stayed in NAB for months or even over a year, I do have a concern about this idea. What if it stays in the system that long simply because it was never noticed? This would mean that potentially great articles that were never noticed would be deleted. I’m sure that does happen in NAB, what with a backlog of over 11,000 articles.
@Lugia2453
I recognize that problem. I know that the wikiHaus has been releasing review bots lately. That might help to weed out some articles.
system
15
Even with the wikiHaus assistance, if I knew that this was implemented, I would actually reconsider editing on wikiHow, knowing that just because an article of mines hasn’t been checked for a certain amount of time, it would be deleted, regardless of the amount of time and research I did. I actually don’t mind how many of the articles I started are walloping around, being non-reviewed, but auto-deleted? Yeah, no.
I’m not in favor of the deletion idea either. How about this: If an article sits in the hatchery for over a year, it is taken out of the hatchery?
One of the beautiful things about the Hatchery is that we don’t have to delete the articles. Not after one year or ever. In fact the more unfinished articles we have in the Hatchery the better as they will potentially be useful for raw material for published articles. Articles in the Hatchery will not clog up any workflow queues, so there is really no reason to ever delete them.
Anna
18
@Maluniu
@WritingEnthusias14
As I understand it, this idea would specifically not involve deletion, even after a certain time. Check out Jack’s point here - it’s about *not* having to get aggressive with deleting articles in a queue, but letting people publish their ideas more freely, without it becoming a huge NAB-style backlog. Someone could even come back to a hatchery article they made earlier and work on it months later to get it into promotion-worthy shape
* Edit: Hah, reply clash with Jack himself. So, read what he said
@JackHerrick
The un-promoted articles will be hidden except to experienced contributors, right? If that’s the case, then I sort of agree that there’s no reason to delete. However, I hope we’re not going to let this replace our deletion policy.
system
20
My concern lies in the fact that articles in the hatchery seem to be immune to the deletion policy. Spammers aren’t going to know or care if their articles aren’t published, they just hit the submit button and are off. I can almost see a whole bunch of content farm submissions sitting there in the hatchery. Am I the only one who actually likes the name? I think it’s a great name. Article Incubator sounds great too, but day care makes me think of a kids’ pre-school instead. I suppose this would complement the NAB system, but would an article in the hatchery be simultaneously visible in the NAB tool too? Either way, this actually sounds quite awesome, and would raise wikiHow’s quality.
