Hi everyone, the team has just shipped another design update! They’ve given the article bylines an update, which is in part intended to highlight all of the hard work that has gone into researching and writing all of our articles. It’s especially going to improve the mobile experience for wikiHow readers, who will now see a lot more information on how an article was researched by the community, checked by our various testing teams, and approved through reader ratings.
Of course there’s been a lot of background work on this, including lots of testing, so I’m sure it’ll be a positive move for our readers! You can check it out by loading any article :)
1 Like
Just saw it as I was perusing some Minecraft articles… I love it!
One thing I’ve noticed that I’m a bit confused about - if an article isn’t expert co-authored, it says it was co-authored by X amount of contributors, but if it is, it just attributes everything to that expert and nobody else is mentioned? I get wanting to put the experts on the front of it, but the implication I would get from that is that the expert wrote the article themselves, which is not the case the majority of the time. It’s actually a little disappointing because a big part of our attitude is that we’re volunteer-driven and everything is collaborative, but it basically implies “authorship” of a page, when (as I recall) we actually deliberately took specific volunteer names off of the main article pages because it implied authorship or ownership of the page.
JayneG
4
@Galactic-Radiance
yeah, this was something that was definitely considered at length. There’s a lot of important information that we want to present about each article, and it was important to still display the total number of contributors in the right rail and at the bottom of the article, but unfortunately it’s not possible to display all of the details of the article’s authorship in the byline.
I can see where that would be problematic… Maybe do a “Written by X writers, including [insert expert co author’s name here], an expert co-author!”
I’d imagine there has
to be a way to credit both co-authors and other contributors in the byline, because the previous byline that was removed was something like “With edits by [contributor A], [contributor B], [contributor C], and others”. A message like “Expert Co-Authored by [expert], with edits by [number] others” is not that much longer.
To be completely honest, the message I’m getting is essentially “if we have an expert co-author, then none of the other contributors are relevant”. That… stings, and basically sends the message that the volunteers are not necessary or important here.
I think it looks good! Thanks to the wikiHow engineers for working so hard on this!
It looks really awesome, I love it!
@Galactic-Radiance
there are a lot of factors at play with this that I’m not familiar with. I do know that it was never the intention to make volunteers feel unnecessary or unimportant, so I’m sorry that you are feeling that. As I understand it, it is designed to be a way to help more readers and encourage trust and authority.
Is there a change on the mobile site? As a primarily mobile wikiHowian, I didn’t see anything with it.
Wow, looks awesome! I love it.
@JayneG
Just a question though… some articles say " Authored by the wikiHow Community
," and some say " Co-authored by 8 contributors
". Is this because that when there are less than X amount of contributors, it won’t show?
@WikiaWang
I was wondering the exact same thing, that was my theory as well
JayneG
14
@Emily_Pole
the byline is on all articles on all page sizes, so it is on mobile articles too. It’s just right underneath the title of the article.
@WikiaWang
and @PianoLover1016
I believe that is correct :)
@JayneG
Thanks! I saw that later. Either I wasn’t paying attention or it needed a little bit of time to adjust. xD
Although I do like the fact that we can now see a simplified version of the category tree of where an article was placed (inside the white header/intro area), I really don’t like the byline in terms of how it’s expressing how much we volunteers are valued - I’m much like Alex in this respect. I’m feeling the same way as him, like we volunteers are just an tiny seedling that’s not going to be shown while those staff members are going to be valued and shown at length the name and even a short bio - especially on articles where I don’t have a byline name myself - it’s almost like I didn’t even start it - if looked at with a quick glance.
*sighs*
I get what ya’ll are sayin’ @Galactic_Radiance
and @Byankno1
. Buuuuttttt… this design update looks really cool! And like a lot of thought and work went into it. I’m sure we all know it’s not a competition about who wrote the most, who contributed the best, yadda yadda. However, I also get that this is frustrating, that it sorta seems like volunteers are just… bleh. Maybe there could be a part, once you click the link, that says “article started by __” and then if you click another link, it could show a little list of all the people who contributed, with their names linked to their user page.
Because showing the expert coauthor (I liked that they said coauthor, and not authoris really important, and I like that how it is. They’re not taking credit for it, but it certainly makes an article look more credible than say, something on Instructables.
Sure, showing the expert co-author is important, but it’s also important to not throw away the work of anyone else who contributed to the article. The implication of the term co-author, to me at least, is that they did at least some of the writing, not that they just reviewed it and made a couple of tweaks (which is what our expert review usually entails). I’m honestly very upset that people are going to look at the work of many editors and then just attribute it all to the expert because they’re the only one listed (the majority of people are not going to click on an attribution link, and page history is also inaccessible to those who are signed out). You can argue it’s not about credit in a collaborative project, but as-is, we’re essentially attributing everything to the co-author and completely ignoring anyone else who contributed, which is not and is never how wikiHow was supposed to operate. We’re a collaborative project. We deliberately didn’t list authors on articles (except on their User pages) due to the collaborative nature of wikiHow. Even non-collaborative websites that had multiple authors on a page will credit all authors when possible. It’s not that difficult to add the number of contributors to the byline, and is something we really should
be doing because the number of contributors doesn’t seem to appear on smaller screens anyway, except at the very bottom of the page where most people don’t even reach.
I sound angry. I am angry, really. There’s been a significant decline in the way volunteers are treated as of late and it’s been seriously putting me off the project. Being an authoritative source is fine - it’s quite commendable, in fact. But when the work and effort and sometimes even the expertise of volunteers is getting pushed to the side in favor of expert co-authors, it’s going to make the volunteers feel unwanted. I know I certainly feel like I’ve poured years into a project that no longer sees me as valuable because I don’t have a university degree yet, and I can’t say I want to continue contributing if we’re not even going to be acknowledged at all on a good majority of our pages. This is supposed to be a collaborative project. There’s no good feeling in doing what’s essentially just ghostwriting for a random person with a college degree who we never interact with.
XxVxX
20
I agree with the points made already. While I do like the look of the redesign, I do agree that perhaps there could be a way to make sure volunteers are mentioned, in addition to the expert co-author. I like the idea of it saying, perhaps, “This article was edited by _ contributors, including _ (expert) who is a _(occupation) with _ years of experience.“ It could still have the checkmark staying it’s been expert reviewed as well. I have to say, this new redesign is kind of upsetting to me as well, and seeing this on one of my articles would kind of make me feel like my hard work was less valued. While yes, it’s important for readers to know which articles were expert-reviewed, I think it’s just as important for everyone who has worked on an article to be recognized in some way, shape or form, as even a volunteer who isn’t considered an “expert” who has edited the article may have the expertise to technically be considered one, but isn’t. Like Alex pointed out, many experts merely review the article, and/or fix grammar, whereas other editors may have written the majority of the article.
