…I wanted to share the good news that we have recently surpassed all of our previous readership records. If you look at the last 31 days, we were read by over 37 million people! (Our previous record was 36 million in May 2011.) And on just one day this week 1,726,201 people visited the site! We have now had several days when over 10,000 people were viewing the site at the same second! Wow! Old timers will remember how crushing it was for all of us when a change to the Google algorithm (Panda) knocked 40% of our readership numbers in one sad day in June 2011. The good news was that this shock rallied the community and wikiHaus to push harder on quality than we had in the past. So now that we have recovered and surpassed our previous traffic levels should we now just relax and stop worrying about quality? Of course not! Our mission is to build the world’s highest quality how-to manual. Now that we have more readers (which usually brings more editors), we should be accelerating our quality efforts. I’d like us to have the most popular topics on wikiHow be something that we are all proud of. Right now at least 24% of these articles are well below our minimum quality level. (See http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/3438/results-from-our-quality-ratings
for details.) Our goal is to build a site so good that folks remember it by name! And we have a growing list of ideas on how we can accomplish that too. Out there in the community are lots of good ideas we haven’t yet worked on to improve quality. @Dr+Ron+Shapiro has some good ideas around expert verified pages for example. There is plenty we can still do to improve our quality. Let’s take a minute here to celebrate our new readership milestone. Now more than ever we are informing and improving the lives of millions of people! Give a woot in the comment box below to celebrate! And share what you think about this milestone. …And if you have ideas to increase our quality even further, let’s hear them. Congrats to everyone who has done so much over these last few months!
Thanks for jinxing us
In all seriousness, this is good news. Well, the quality won’t make itself…
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Congrats to everyone for bringing up the records and stats up =) Honestly, it doesn’t even seem like 9 months since we got together in the forums about the Google Panda… that’s just crazy!
I have seen his articles and was astonished about them. I admire those whom bring in their expert advice about things that wikiHow doesn’t have already. I have seen epic work from a variety of people - Lewis & his photography, Caidoz & her jewelry, Monica & her personal care, Elyne & her makeup, Teresa & her gluten free dishes, Lois & her crafts, Metguy & his thorough edits about baseball… the list can go on.
I’m very sorry, but we severely need to do a change around with the youth overload.
Who wants to host a party? I’ll bring confetti if I don’t have to. WOOT! :{D
THIS is GREAT!! :)) GREAT job everyone!!
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This is EXCELLENT news Jack! Thanks for sharing! And … wow… just… WOW… at 10K in the same second! Oh. My. God. I am in agreement with Maluniu on one significant area in need of a quality overhaul. Our Youth section needs some serious help. I cringe when I read the vapid expounding of young teens on the ever recurring topics of popularity, beauty, love, and TV-personality-of-the-week. Add to that the plethora of multiple articles on every possible permutation of the above topics, and we’ve got a quagmire of quality problems in that area.
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First of all, congratulations to everyone! That’s truly a remarkable milestones and is hopefully an indicator of positive things to come. Secondly, I do agree with @Maluniu
and @Loiswade42
about our inherent systemic bias favoring youth-related articles. While it’s true that we want to have how-to articles on as many topics as possible, it can be damaging to over-populate ourselves with articles that don’t fairly represent the reading audience. I think having more stringent guidelines for character (how to be like xxx) is a great move towards reducing this bias, but there’s still a ways to go. It’s pretty early in the morning for me to have a genius panacea for the issue though!
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Anyone that has communicated with me in IRC knows that I don’t like to re-organize nor create new categories in the Youth category in order of attempt to organize or for their benefit due to the overwhelming growth ----- but I do it anyway. I felt weirded out when Monica asked if there was any way to divide the youth bedroom style category up as the youth personalities. I know it’s doable, needed, and I agree with her - but how many sub categories can be in there amongst the current category tree for them? And no, it’s not just what’s in the current youth category now - there’s so many youth related or focused articles around the entire site that it’s not even funny. It doesn’t need to be about relationships, school, or be like character articles. I’ll put money down that wikiHow still has more than 800 Club Penguin articles (in during our Club Penguin project, Teresa calculated a little more than 1,000). Maniac pointed out to me sometime last week about the suspicious increase of kid snacks that kids make (like bizarre and off the wall cracker and toast creations). There’s more than 300 Nerf articles. There’s god knows how many RuneScape articles. Spying and ninja hoopla. SCENE. EMO. God knows how many sleepover articles. If anything, I’ll blame the coffee… but this is usually how I am when voicing opinions about the wikiHow youth population nonetheless.
There are 200 in the regular category itself, so I’d wager a guess that there are about 500. IMO, this isn’t about youth at all seeing as you have to be 13+ to enjoy it unrestricted in the first place. Yeah…if all the youth articles (including video games and articles about popular culture) had to be pushed off a cliff to make the site a much higher quality for the adult population, I’d be the first to line them up with the cliffside. Of course, it doesn’t work that way per se, and we have to keep our youth viewers in mind.
Congratulations to wikiHowians new and old! Thanks to all for helping our how-to manual!
Whoo! What is Google Panda though?
“Panda” was the name of a large change to the Google algorithm that effected us and many other sites.
:0 These are the end times.
How did it effect us? What did it do?
