Hey wikiHow staff, it would be super cool if we could follow users on wikiHow. I’d really want that widget!
We’d add this (I’m not any part of the staff, but I know some stuff about how the site works), except our site isn’t a social media site. It’d be cool, though!
Years ago when I first started here (2011) I mentioned to Krystle (the Community Moderator) that I’d love to see single user’s RSS feeds for what contributions they are making. However, at that time I was so new, I didn’t even know a lot about the site and most of it’s policies. I quickly drew back on my hope that I would one day see this in action. Now, that’s not to say it’s not in the ultimate plans for the site. Some things do take time to develop, and those that are in development now are mostly fixes for high bug issues for such a small engineering team that this site has at the moment.
Thanks for letting wikiHow know. They do listen to whatever input is given. Even if the advice isn’t integrated soon, it’s been noticed. I’m not a Staff member, but as any one of the Staff would tell you, “Thank you.”
I don’t want to sound rude here, but what exactly would the point of this widget be? I can’t really see this being of much practical use; I can only really see people using it for “friends lists”, and that would only matter if who you followed was public. If it’s a widget with no real benefit to the users, regardless of its publicity, why have it? :s
^ +1
I do not support this at all, it won’t improve the site and might even make it worse with glitches.
I actually like this idea. I personally have trouble finding some users back after visiting their page, and if they write interesting content, I’d like to be able to find them back.
In most cases I’ll just bookmark the page, but if there would be an in-site feature to do that, great!
The idea for following a person shouldn’t be considered wrong just because social media sites use the same function.
You can always bookmark their userpage. People will start that scam of “Please follow me!” thinking it’s a game. They may even start threads saying “I reached 100 followers on wikiHow” forgetting the whole goal here. Other wikis don’t have followers, why should we? Sorry but -1
OoT2D
9
On one hand, it could be cool to follow an author to keep up with their latest articles but…
Same can be said about thumbs up. If the issue would be people being attracted to getting more followers, simply remove the ability to see how many followers one person has. No “discrimination” and isn’t attractive to people who care only about followers. Honestly, I see more pros than cons having such a feature implemented. Other wiki’s might not have it, but other informational sites do. Take Quora for example. One of the reasons I like it is because you can follow people who you think are interesting.
@Danielbauwens
- what’s the purpose of this feature, though? Aside from being likely to add a ton of bugs, there’s no real purpose to it besides just being able to see when someone posts a new article. If you patrol enough or just check their user page now and again, you’re bound to see it.
@Galactic-Radiance
As I explained earlier I like keeping in touch with some users their work. And that’s also exactly what following means. That you get notified when something new happens. Back in the day I used to patrol around 400 - 500 edits a day. I simply do not have the time now to patrol anymore. Same with other people. You can’t expect everyone to spend time patrolling just to figure out if someone started something new. Also, a ton of bugs? I think you’re grossly exaggerating the complexity of a follow function. Firstly, if any bugs at all, it would only hinder those using the feature, and not cause problems to the main site, which is the most important part. Secondly, we haven’t dropped out on new features because there might be bugs, if that’d be the case, we’d probably be a wikipedia clone, with no greenhouses, or spelling checker etc… I’m not saying go implement this now, I can imagine there are more important things needed at the moment. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be a good thing to have overtime.
@Danielbauwens
Okay, maybe I jumped to conclusions with the patrolling thing, but you can still bookmark that user’s page. We don’t need a follow feature just to keep track of what someone does. What would this feature even track? Edits? New articles? We’ve already got the Contributions section for every user. I don’t see why you’d need to be notified when someone makes an edit. And I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say it would implement a lot of bugs - look at the Spellchecker bugs or the NAB count dropping to 0 when the PHP update was rolled out. We’ve also had SpecialPages die out before - there were no major updates made to the site and it just crashed.
I think we might have to agree to disagree on this one, but I just don’t see how this feature would be of any use. It’d just be another thing that staff has to maintain. I can’t see myself using it when I can just check someone’s user page.
I see where @Danielbauwens
is coming from. Daniel was a heavy contributor only a couple of years ago, but has had to change to visiting the site infrequently. Perhaps he is thinking that he would at least like to glance at the new articles and bold edits of several dozen contributors. I am in the same boat. There are some individuals who contribute awesome, highly useful articles about things I am interested in, for one reason or another.
-
Some articles I would like to read for the content.
- @Atheia
on math or physics
- @CQinPDX
on using nifty advanced wikiHow features
- @YachtcaptainDano
on learning a lot about how to fly an airplane without spending much
- @WildRoseBeef
on farming and plant identification
- @Jcomeau_ictx
- @PJ-min
-
I would read articles by some wikiHowians so I could help make their articles better, basically because we have worked together in the past and I know I can:
- help smooth their article
- help their article be more vibrant, or direct, or any number of things
-
I would just like to let some contributors know that I support them by leaving them a short note.I could spend a bunch of time checking these particular user pages for new articles and their contributions for bold edits and get nothing. On the other hand, software could do the same checks periodically and let me know when something showed up.
And, for what it is worth, creating this functionality is not in the same class as going to a newer version of MediaWiki software nor is it in the same class as updating PHP. Those changes were more at the core and affected much of the custom software created by wikiHow engineers. Although I do not know what the engineers might run into when trying to roll out a “follow” feature, I would hope that the issues that arose would be a little less pervasive and persnickety than the major, core change @Galactic-Radiance
cites.
^I agree. Also, if you have similarities with another user and you want to know if they created a new article, it would be awesome because then I would know exactly when it was created and I could pitch in with my knowledge right away. There could be lots of benefits from it!
Marina
16
I don’t like this idea. I think that it’s an easy way to take a lot of the wikiHaus time that could be spent working on some of the very old bugs we have and instead push it towards a controversial new tool that inherently will cause it’s own problems. Following works for Quora because Quora is almost a forum in itself. It’s very social-mediaey. And that works for them. I don’t think a following tool works for us, as it shifts a lot of the focus from simply writing and drafting to doing it for this new, external purpose. What I could get behind are a private list of people you follow that only you see, but I personally wouldnt even use that. In terms of a big public follower/following list, though? Nada. Not where I see wikiHow and not the direction I think this site is/should go. The last thing we need to do is introduce a “tool” that feels almost obligatory to take part in like a following/follower count would.
I was burrowing in the forums a while ago and there was something like following people, except it was called hearts or something…? and people liked it or something but then the whole idea got sunken.
@Marina
+1
Maybe in the future perhaps, or perhaps not =)
