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One of the best things about the past few months is that we are all starting to take the “build the world’s highest qualityhow-to manual” part of our mission more seriously than we have in the past. Folks like @Caidoz have been especially effective at identifying low quality work and letting us all know when we could and should demand better. And @Dave-Crosby has found ways to delete low quality content faster. Wikipedia has a great and detailed article rating scale that rates over 1.5 million articles in the English Wikipedia. With that in mind, I created a spreadsheet where we could rate the quality of 2500 of wikiHow articles. So far I’ve rated about 100 articles on a score of 1-5 and also made comments when an article could benefit from wikiPhoto or similar. It’s pretty fun. If we can fill this spreadsheet out with quality ratings it will help us prioritize what bad articles need to get fixed, identify which articles could use the wikiPhoto treatment, and identify high quality articles which could become FAs and / or get translated to Spanish, German or Portuguese. I’d like to invite NABers and Admins to help with this effort. If you are interested post here or email @Krystle and one of us will invite you into the spreadsheet. Happy quality rating!

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I’ll help!:slight_smile:

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I’m interested.

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I’d like to help with this

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Quite interested.

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Me too!:slight_smile:

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Fantastic, I’m already seeing some good quality rating from @Maniac and @IsabellZita . Thanks guys. BTW, the spreadsheet is in alphabetical order and it’s funny that so far everyone has skipped over the “How to Be…” section. Ha! I would have thought everyone would have LOVED to have rated those articles.:slight_smile:

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^ You spelled my username wrong…:wink:And thanks for the compliment!:slight_smile:

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@Metsguy234 Just mark them as “dup” @King-Peter , @Caidoz , @Tiagoroth , @Writelf - sent you invites!:slight_smile:

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How are the articles selected? Is it random?

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I would love to help, though I’d like to see clearer definition on the ratings – rather than opinion… For example, 0 = Not appropriate, no content, spam, otherwise unsuitable for wikiHow & should be deleted immediately 1 = Multiple problems with a combination of bad spelling, poor formatting, difficult to understand, may be NFD for various reasons. 2 = Formatted but not well presented, minimal stub work, in need of major copyediting 3 = Average article with a fair amount of steps with minimal spelling atrocities but may need work in detail expanding, pictures, and weaved links as well as readability. 4 = Above average article with good pictures, links, proper spelling and grammar and fairly easy to understand but may need some tweaks to practicality, expanding some tips, etc. “Rising Star” quality. 5 = wikiHow’s best quality work with perfect spelling and grammar, an appealing introduction, clear photos, many details, complete with video, weaved links, and well-referenced citations where needed. Very practical and real, easy to follow and read, and exemplifies the epitome of what a wikiHow article should be. Featured article quality.

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I’d be willing to help out.

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I can help out.

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I agree with @SudoKing , it’s kind of hard to decide what number to do just on “good” and “very good” and the like.

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I’d also be willing to try it.

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@IsabelleZita I think it was generated with a script, though I’m not sure of the specifics…I’m pretty confident it’s not random:slight_smile: @SudoKing Thanks for the feedback. Check out Jack and Chris’ ratings on the spreadsheet to get a better idea for each number. The guidelines you laid out are good too. Ultimately though it’s subjective, which is why this project is open to admins and boosters - people who we know have enough experience on wikiHow to make a judgment call that’s likely to resonate with the big picture of wikiHow. @Loiswade42 @Elocina I sent you invites. @Helpersz I forgot your e-mail address, can you send me a note with it so I can share the doc with you?

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Here is how the list was generated. I took the top 2500 or so how-to searches from Google. I then mapped them to existing articles on wikiHow. We had articles on about 2000 of these 2500 topics. (Believe it or not we haven’t even covered 500 of the 2500 most popular how-to phrases on the web yet! Note some of them are inappropriate topics for wikiHow though.) Elizabeth then deleted the duplicates, which took us down to 1600 or so. So this list should contain the 1600 most popular how-to phrases currently on the web. It won’t be exact, it’s more realistically 1600 of the top 5000. We should make it our goal to eventually have 4 and 5 star quality articles on most of these topics. So every time we find 2 star or 3 star work, we have opportunities for large improvement. ANd when we find 1 star work…oh my! And just for the record I DID see @Metsguy234 doing some awesome rating in there.:slight_smile: @SudoKing - I like your more elaborate ratings scheme. I started with a simple few word 1-5 star system just to get us rolling quickly. But if this becomes a popular wikiHow activity, I would think we would want to formalize it along the lines you suggested.

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I did a handful tonight. Think I ended up editing more than actually rating, hehe.:wink:It was just shocking how much spam/nonsense (especially in the Tips and Things You’ll Need) I found in these popular titles.

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*bump* Anybody else interested in helping with this?:slight_smile:

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@Krystle I’ll try to help. Waiting your invite.