I have a suggestion that would be very useful for those users who are registered users of wikiHow. Similar to the streamer bar that comes up on the main wikihow.com
homepage as “You have a Talk Page message”, have ANOTHER streamer that tells the requester(who’s posted a request on the Request a New Article) that their article has been written. About two weeks ago, I requested an article. Although I’ve yet to see the email that says it’s been written(which I use to keep track of written requests), an article of my request was written. The only proof of this I had gotten, was another author writing a forum post that said he had copyright problems to the requested article. If this would have been in place, I could have been alerted to this article in real-time. Even if the streamer bar says “(x # of articles published”, and then after clicking the link, this would have alerted me to the article name, and therefore have satisfied my conditions. I hope none of my other requested articles have been written. (If someone sees an article of mine, please post the link on my wall. I don’t generally keep my notes nearby my computer). A few months back, I asked @Krystle
a question about topics still listed in “Requested Articles which are still listed”. I’d like to write a follow-up to prove to her that, although I’ve written an article with a badly formatted title name(name was later changed), the article with the bad name has reappeared in this list. If you people would look through the entire list of all >250,000 requested articles(or have a robot do this task) to see which articles have been written but never deleted, it would clear this problem up. Several thousand articles I tried to write a few months back, I found out were already written. One example: type “hotmail” into the requester. You’ll come up with “How Can I Change My Password in Hotmail”(of which I wrote and later requested a title change). You’d see that many articles have already been written but never cleared from the list yet. There are many, many(numerous) other articles in other categories that have the same problem. It’s time someone did something about this. Checking the log of the history of some of these articles, dates them back to before 2007 up to present time. If you were to clean this list up, you probably wouldn’t have to keep a “goal” to this app on the Community Dashboard(and therefore you could probably just keep articles requested(with no goal in place). Some articles do unlist themselves after several minutes after publishing, but some don’t. For articles that are recipe articles, I feel articles should have a one-line text-box that can be selected in the same style as “Requested wikiHow’s” or “Food Ingredients” that would have the recipe creator enter the servings amount(makes x servings). As it stands right now, there are several improper places where other writers write this information. “Tips” and"Food Ingredients(saw a few of these examples within last week). By writing it in its own speical box, would help readers understand how many servings this recipe makes that would be more formalized. I have a few problems with the forums on my mobile browser. Although the PC website version has a real quick way to see if a topic has been closed from the list, on the mobile version, the only time when we are able to see this, is after we touch the listing and scroll down to the bottom. The prominence of a “closed” tag from the list on a mobile browser version of the forums is critical. Even if the button is non-graphical when viewed in the list, it would take the guessing out of this game of knowing this more quickly. Also, with the forums on a mobile browser, there’s no way to view the full site after clicking a button at the bottom of the screen(unlike that of the full wikiHow mobile website). This mobile site of the forums, just doesn’t work for me.
I wouldn’t mind a page like the proposed redirects, but only for duplicate or similar requests. I like the idea of a bot going through them and matching any request to an existing article and making an entry on the page asking if the request is the same as the article title, which one would say Yes or No to. Yes = the request is removed. No = the request is re-added. Wouldn’t mind working on this for a week or two, just to see that discouragingly high number go down
Actually, that’s not quite the issue I envisioned. Actually do the example, you’ll only find less than fifty items. Look at hereby requested article. It says it’s been written. Then why is it still in the requested app if it’s been written already? Clean up all THOSE articles from the list! But your idea is another good idea!
system
4
If there’s a bad title in the list of requests, it can be deleted by an admin. What is the title?
Read original article for the one, but there are so many in there, I don’t know where to start after that.
@Krystle
, I’ll make a screencast of this and I’ll post the screencast on your Talk Page later this week. These articles need to be cleared out from the list. And, although the article I’m proving to you is a problem, there are several more that are on the list, that haven’t been cleared either(and, like I said, they go back as far as articles that were originally written in 2007)!
@krystle
: I’ve figured out the reason to why the titles have gotten back to the request list. When the article is created, and the title is changed, it goes back into a requested position. If a title change hasn’t occurred, it’ll disappear until a title change takes place… I found several occurrences of this just to START OFF(but is not limited to only these 2), but a bot has to go throughbthem all and figure out if this has indeed taken place for the rest of the 288000 requested articles. Just 2 EXAMPLES are Switch From Hotmail to Gmail as well as How Can I change my Hotmail password(or something along that idea-topic to search under is Hotmail) The resultant pages come up as "the article you requested has already been written(with it’s new name in place-do you want to edit this article or create another article of a different nature) For articles that haven’t been renamed, they completely dissolve off this list. If you were to clear the massive list to remove these renamed articles, you’d see this number go down drastically…
Also @krystle
, when requesting articles, it won’t let us request articles for the wikihow category, yet this category is still displayed on the “answer requests” page.
