_ Tl;dr - Try reviewing potential stubs in the Topic Tagging Tool
!_
More info, for the curious:
Raising the Bar, All the Time:
wikiHow’s quality is growing, slowly but surely, every day. As reader expectations have risen over the years, we, as a community, have heard that call. I’m really proud of that we’ve raised our standards to make sure every new contribution to wikiHow is as helpful as it can be - and as helpful as trusting readers expect.
It’s not always an easy mountain we climb, especially when the hill gets steeper over time, but one of the wikiHausers, @Bridget8
, had a neat experience the other day that exemplifies why we keep raising that bar. She met a college student who had “grown up” seeing wikiHow around when they were in high school - the first thing they said to her upon hearing she worked on this project was how much wikiHow’s content had improved over the last few years. They had noticed the difference, and it meant they were continuing to use wikiHow as a source for advice now into their adulthood, when they otherwise might not have - pretty cool, and shows we’re doing something right in our mission
One thing we try to do periodically is take a look back at articles that were boosted when our quality bar was lower. Sometimes these are still great articles, and sometimes they look pretty stubby by modern standards. You all see it when you’re out there patrolling and topic-editing, too, and add stub tags where needed - that’s great! We also look at helpfulness ratings and other data, and add stub tags where there’s clearly significant room for improvement. However, the ratings don’t *always* tell the full story, especially on difficult topics or on topics that people “like” the idea of, even when they’re not particularly helpful. Some of these pages really need human review to see if they have the detail, depth, accuracy, and helpfulness to serve readers well. If they don’t, we’d like to add a stub tag to remove those pages from reader views until they get a revamp. Sstubbed topics go into the Topic Greenhouse for topic enthusiasts to add to (or to add an NFD if needed), and often onto our wikiHaus content team to-do list, as well, so many will get a new lease on life once they’re more helpful!
How You Can Help Today:
With this goal in mind, @Chris-H
and I are hoping you’ll be interested in a bit of an experiment: we’ve commandeered the “Topic Tagging Tool” to help us review potential stubs. These are articles that seem, from the data, like they’re likely to be unhelpful, but they could use human review. Getting consensus on each from a number of tool voters could be super helpful.
The tool won’t automatically add stub tags or add any kind of permanent tag on the article, but once the batch of articles is all done, we’ll review the vote results and add stub tags using Stub-Bot, where there’s a consensus that articles need more work.
You can chime in by voting here: https://www.wikihow.com/Special:TopicTagging
Hoping you guys are game to help us try this out… It’ll be a bit experimental, but let’s see how it works out once the votes roll in. It could be a great way to build consensus all those borderline topics and make sure we don’t have lots of older low-quality articles live out there hurting readers’ trust in us. Another way for us all to keep climbing this mountain and keep quality high across the board
