Hello Wikihowians, I have looked at many, many Animal Jam articles as well as different category articles and found something: they are mostly opinionated! For example, one might say you have to be pink and white with a pink blanket in order to look cute etc. It’s more of a common thing in video game articles, but I’ve seen it in a few “real life” articles. Sure, if you personally like pink nail polish you don’t have to say it. Everyone has their own opinion, their own way of seeing things. Just like some like sunshine and some like moonlight and some like red and some like yellow. It can be confusing, and really clutter up our Wikihow if everyone based information around their own opinion. How many more ‘Be Pretty’ articles or rather ‘Be Pretty: My Way (the best way)’. Someone!/ own opinion could become a method, but not the ‘only’ or ‘best’ way. I think the policy should make it clear that many people collaborate and everyone has their own opinion, so opinions should be avoided, but if you find one way easier that’s a small exception, providing you state in what way is an article easy or hard, advantages and disadvantages. Did you read through this all? I hope so. So, shall we change our policies? Please help me out here, all those who support this. I’m not sure what I’m getting in to. -Dusk
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Perhaps we should narrow the scope of this? Give concrete examples of topics which would be affected? Outline concrete steps to take if/when the policy is approved?
I am in favor of removing opinion from articles, but don’t see the need to remove opinion articles, or at least to change policy by adding an nfd/opinion reason. If we are to provide a complete how to manual, there are places where opinion (choose the best, etc) are actually useful.
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But aren’t groupings of similar opinions generally following one trend or style? In such cases, it would make sense to have the title of each article specifying which style or trend it’s referring to.
Be popular and be pretty, be preppy, be Emo, be Goth, be cute, be handsome, be fashionable, look good are opinion.
Can I get a small tab in wiki forums that let’s me look at who posted a comment after I did? It could be designed so that you can turn off the notifications at any given time, and also it could run along side of the comments from any discussions you have created. For example, it could have a feature like Apple’s push notifications, being to turn that off also, but it could operated exactly like the tab for previous discussions you had created. Also, can closed forums PLEASE be deleted forever, along with the owner having the option to do the same?
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Just throwing an idea out there… What if? We started with an article tag… something like our discussion page tags that warn readers that the content may be offensive? Only these would be for an article… warning readers that the content is subjective and not supportable by empirical data? Or… perhaps a tag noting that a goal can be accomplished multiple ways and that the contents of the article may be subject to interpretation? We wouldn’t need to NFD everything right away… just catalog and see exactly what we’re up against? This would also tag the articles for consideration of an NFD OPI at a later date? We did something similar with political articles… back a while ago… in order to stop the endless mudslinging on talk pages and endless edit wars associated with various political factions arguing and attempting to undermine each others POV. I’m not convinced that we would need to delete opinion articles yet… but tagging them would give us something to base our potential deletion criteria on. Thoughts?
While those articles are automatically opinionated, I think that they should more specify what an all around good looking person usually is, and then a few methods on opinions or something. Loiswade, that idea is pretty good. It would take a long time to NFD those articles, and take a chunk out of Wikihow. I doubt there is any such tag, but one could be made… Divided, this isn’t a all around suggestion page. We don’t really have the power to do what your talking about anyways, that would take some work. Isabella, that’s a great idea. A massive wikihow article rename, but it would work. This definitely would take some work, there is a lot of those article out here, but it’ll be worth it.
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It’s either all or nothing. With this statement, what really should a “good looking person” appear as? Those are opinions. Even if you had the sources/references/citations for your work, those are also opinions. “and then a few methods on opinions or something”
Got confused there. To sell a policy change concerning opinion articles, you’re going to either have nothing or the current ways of how people write.
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It seems to me that the core issue is how to treat opinion type articles over all. Deleting them outright isn’t a good answer, as many are decent advice (albeit a bit biased) that we wouldn’t want to lose. Tagging them is one option… as a way to warn the reader to take anything in the article with the knowledge that it can be interpreted multiple ways. Frankly? This seems a bit redundant / foolish / unnecessary to me… as most readers of the internet already know to screen out opinion when reading articles… but… I can see potential situations arising when someone is either new to the English language… or young enough to be impressionable… where this type of caveat might be useful.
Well, some opinions count, like most people in their right mind find someone covered in mud, stink like dung and treating others like dirt rather unattractive. Then again, who would do that? I think ‘fad tags’ should be made, tags that explain that this is current fad and might not be beautiful to some as well as that if you find yourself beautiful then it doesn’t matter what the article says. This seems more like a tag sort of thing then a policy change, now that I think of it.
I could see this being similar to the {{controversial}} tag we put on discussion pages of articles about controversial topics (such as How to Get an Abortion). It states that “Our goal is to write an accurate how-to manual on every subject, including those that not everyone will find agreeable. Please edit this article to reflect its title; do not change the content to a different subject. Opposing views can be written as a new article.” I’d suggest that we maybe place these tags on articles such as spanking or hacking that some people may not find okay. Likewise, we could make another template saying something along the lines of “this topic may be subjective or opinionated, and may not necessarily apply to every person. It should be treated as a general rule of thumb or as a suggestion, not as scientific fact.”
I support @AndrewG1999
’s excellent suggestions for tagging the spanking and hacking discussion pages as controversial and the tagging the discussion pages of opinion articles with an {{opinion}} tag.
@IsabelleZita
100% agree. It would be good to include software too. From personal experience, I can tell you it’s frustrating and a waste of time to follow the steps in an article only to find out your version is different and it doesn’t work. In my case, I have Photoshop 10 but with the exception of one, the articles don’t specify.
Okay, so is there already an opinion tag?
Lojjik
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The relevant discussion templates are {{ID}} (offensive content) and {{discussionheader}} (reminder to keep comments about the contents of the article)
