JayneG
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Hi everyone,
I’ve been chatting with the wikiHaus team over the last week, and it’s come up that deindexing and then reindexing articles can really hurt its chance of reaching readers once it’s put live again. So, adding a stub tag can actually have a pretty negative effect on an article, even if it gets edited and has the tag taken off.
Because of this, it seems that as a community we should try to avoid stubbing or deindexing articles that might need some editing. If you find an article that you think is stubby or has other issues, but you cannot improve it yourself, please send me a message directly on my talk page to let me know. This way, I can check it out and likely pass it over to the content team for an update.
I know this is different from what some of you are used to doing, but we are hopeful changing this process will help articles continue to reach our readers!
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Hello, do you think it’s possible to make it so that inuse tags don’t hide published articles? I noticed that articles that are otherwise promoted get demoted once and inuse tag is put on it. Maybe if an inuse tag is on an article, the tag won’t be displayed to anonymous users, and they can be blocked from editing it instead of displaying a quality review message?
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JayneG
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Yes! As always, @R2_d2000
you are on it! This is on our list to change. Ideally, the inuse tag won’t deindex an article, so I can update this thread when that change has happened.
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What about the stuff that’s in bad shape and that the content team won’t touch, but that we don’t have the time to fix up ourselves?
I know from my experience browsing the Sims categories that there are a ton of articles that need a lot
of work, and I don’t like asking the content team to deal with them because most content workers aren’t familiar with the games and tend to misunderstand their sources. But given that I’m about to start classes, I’m genuinely not going to have time for these ones unless I suddenly develop the superpower of not needing to sleep (or develop bipolar disorder and go into a manic episode, which… given the repercussions of that, I’d really rather not).
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JayneG
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@anon74718567
right, not all articles will be able to be edited, so there may be some triaging! Because we’ve worked separately on those Sims articles and they do tend to be tricky for the content team, we’re pretty good - just might move some of the higher readership ones to wikiHow-fun. We can chat!
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I understand, and I’m sorry because I actually have done it myself. Thanks for lettignus know, @JayneG
, I’ll not do this in the future.
Just wondering, does an {{inuse}} tag hide articles from reach results?
I wish I had the superpower of not sleeping! Then I could spend hours on end editing on wikiHow!
JayneG
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No need to apologize, this is new for all of us! At the moment, the inuse tag does hide an article, but we’re planning to change that so it doesn’t. I’ll keep you posted on that.
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Thanks for the information! If the inuse tag will be changed so that it doesn’t, will there be another way to temporarily hide articles from search results without deindexing them?
In conjunction with this initiative, perhaps Stub Bot could be throttled. In the past I have felt compelled to remove the tag Stub Bot placed on reasonably complete articles.
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Same here, but with the Minecraft and Pokémon categories.
Like Alex, I’m also gonna be resuming school soon enough and I won’t have as much time to spend editing and updating old articles.
I suppose it makes sense, taking articles down for who knows how long ( How to Look Like Misa Amane from Death Note
for example, has had a character tag on it since 2008
) means that article could potentially go a while without people being able to read them, which prevents it from getting shared around and results in more people not knowing it even exists.
One the other hand, there are also the outdated (or I suppose for this example, formerly outdated
) articles to consider, like
that maybe should be (not really sure here) hidden temporarily, or at least marked as outdated (although, given just how large
wikiHow is, and how many
articles make it up, it’s kinda makes sense that some articles are outdated).
Another question… how does this affect articles that were stubbed a longer time ago, like months or years ago? I had put a stubbed article on my mental to-do list, but that plan’s been thrown for a loop now because even though it was stubbed over a year ago, I’m no longer sure if I can work on it.
JayneG
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@Yol_Verinrii
I think the key idea here is that even if an article is outdated, it’s best not to deindex it in order to work on updating it, because doing that can reduce its chances of being brought up in google searches later on. You could either update it without deindexing it, just like on the article you referenced above (great edit, btw!), or passing it over to me so I can triage and send it to the right place.
@anon74718567
you can still work on articles that were stubbed a long time ago, but we just can’t guarantee that the readership will be the same as it was before it was stubbed. But, tbh I’m not sure if Google would handle an older stub the same as a newer one. If I learn more, I’ll let you know.
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Oh, ok. Gotcha.
Just to clarify though, should we hold off on using the inuse tag for now until the update is live, or should we keep using it in the meantime?
JayneG
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Oh! Good news! (thanks for the reminder): The inuse tag can be used without it deindexing the article now! Gaurang got that sorted today
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Great!
Although, what’s gonna happen to the stub tag now? Is it gonna fall into into disuse like some other tags/templates, or is it getting updated as well?
Also, I’ve been meaning to ask, what effects do some of the other tags (eg. character, personal, pictures, or more dire ones like accuracy, attention, clarity, cleanup) have on an article? Same question goes for articles in the Quality Review category.
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Maybe I’m just cranky, but I have to be honest in that I’m really, really put off by this. It feels like yet another instance of volunteers losing autonomy, but this time on a much more serious level. This isn’t something like title changes or demotions that are only available to editors with elevated user rights – this is an article template that we’ve had for who knows how long and that we’ve used to broadly deindex content for years. If we’re not even able to use a template
on non-brand-new content anymore and have to pass all of that on to staff, then that seriously harms our ability to even operate as a wiki, much less a community.
Some of my favorite articles started off as stubs and grew into some pretty impressive behemoths, often as a result of the community collaborating on it. And a lot of people don’t come to wikiHow with the ability to write a near-perfect article right off the bat. (Heck, even some of my
earliest work was stubbed or needed significant cleanup, and I’ve had above-average writing skills since I was about nine or ten.) I’ve seen a ton of editors whose writing has improved significantly as a result of wikiHow, and I’m one of them. If we take a stance of “we can’t apply a template to deindex something that doesn’t meet our standards,” we’re basically saying that either our quality standards aren’t allowed to improve, or that only an article that comes through in perfect or near-perfect shape is ever allowed to go live. And that’s genuinely discouraging to newer editors or people who aren’t already strong writers on wikiHow, especially considering that with the current NAB system, a lot of the stuff that doesn’t meet our quality standards gets deindexed in some sense anyway.
Again, maybe I’m just cranky – I’m sleep-deprived and haven’t eaten nearly enough today. And I know that Google is unpredictable and we sometimes have to pick between “do something the community likes at the expense of readership” and “do something so that we don’t drop off Google but that upsets readers.” But I’m going to be blunt and say I’m genuinely afraid of what this will do to community/volunteer contributions, especially when it seems like our volunteer community has already
been dwindling as a result of Google forcing us to cut off a lot of entry points for volunteers and demote anything in NAB that isn’t on par with content from WRM/Seymour or volunteers with years and years
of experience here.
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JayneG
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I hear where you’re coming from, but just to put it in perspective, the number of promoted articles that get stubbed by community is very small - this is just a note that if you’re interested in improving an article for readers, it’s best not to add the stub tag, because it could hurt it. Articles that are not yet published and have stubs on them can still be developed and progress and be published.
Our standards have increased over the years, no doubt, and many authors have continued to grow with those. We do only publish articles that meet those standards, so adding a stub before promotion is a totally appropriate and a great way for authors and editors to improve and expand an article
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Ok, although that doesn’t exactly answer the question of whether articles tagged with cleanup, accuracy, attention, or those in the QA category face the same predicament, or if the stub tag is being changed in a way that doesn’t harm already promoted articles that have them.
JayneG
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Sorry @Yol_Verinrii
! Those other tags do not effect published articles in the same way because they do not change whether an article is indexed or not. The Quality Review category is added when an article is demoted in NAB, so again that won’t effect the article, because it wouldn’t have been indexed to begin with.
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