A few months ago, the wikiHaus team ran a test to see whether folks are interested in editing single steps to fix mistakes, inaccuracies, and typos by showing them an edit link when they hover over a step. The results were pretty neat - the feature seemed to double the number of folks making their first edit on wikiHow
Because it seems so promising as a way to get readers to help make wikiHow better, @Bsteudel
and @AlissaB
have been working tirelessly ever since to build a real version of this idea: one that not only provides the edit link when you hover on a step but also offers an easy one-step-only edit box, without all the craziness of wikitext. It’s a really tough project to tackle, but we’re just about ready to experimentally launch the first simple version, hopefully today!
This v1 of the Step Editor is set to be very simple. It will only show people the edit links on steps without any “fancy” features (no bullet points, no bold or italics, no links, only one picture, etc - the simplest of steps), and on pages where all recent edits by other users have been patrolled (if there are unpatrolled edits, the links won’t show). To start with it will only roll out to anonymous readers on 5% of articles. Then, if all goes well, it will trickle up from there and we’ll see how it goes. If the concept is as promising in action as it was in testing, Bebeth and the gang will try to expand the functionality to more complicated kinds of steps, with bulletpoints, with links in them, to logged in folks, etc etc. So right now, keep in mind this is a big experiment! If it works well, we’ll go further with it, and if it creates problems, we may pull it back and/or fix bugs and address any issues that come up.
For those interested in trying it out, keep an eye out when you’re logged out. It’s only on 5% of articles for now, but if you spot an edit link that appears when you hover on a “simple” step (no links, no wikitext formatting, no substeps), that’s it! Give it a whirl and let us know what you see!
These edits are also, of course, going to go through RCP and will be tagged in histories with “Single Step Edit” so that we can keep an eye on how things are going and track down any bugs. Patrollers, please let us know what you see! If you come across issues in how it’s working, we want to know - Alissa will be doing lots of tracking and analysis of the edits coming out of this feature to see how much they improve the pages they’re on, but if you see some really great examples, or any poor ones or bugs, please keep us in the loop.
Hopefully it helps get more folks engaged in editing and fixing mistakes around the site
