It’s been over a year and a half since the wikiHaus first started making experimental edits
to articles to include shortened “Quick Summaries” on a range of articles (and actually, the idea goes back even further to tests like this one
from 3 years ago!). In that time, the teams involved have done a ton of experimenting… with formats and styles, with locations, with how much information to include, with different approaches to summary videos, with ways to gather reader feedback, and more… and there’s still more experimentation in the works.
Even in the midst of further experiments, you may have noticed our content team writing more and more Quick Summaries lately. The team is on a mini-mission to get some great summaries ready for a future where we are hopefully a go-to resource both for small-screened devices like smart watches and Amazon Echo Spots and for smart speakers/devices that “read” the Internet aloud, like the Amazon Echo and Google Home. wikiHow, soon to be meeting the needs of “listeners,” as well as readers
To help this effort, our wikiHaus devs have been working on a way to help streamline and standardize the summary system under the hood. I know it can feel a bit restrictive to have a more rigid structure on a wiki feature, but this is one area where it’s really crucial, because devices like the Echo need to know which parts of the summary to read. For example, if we include a last sentence about reading the article below, our systems need to know not to send that bit to the Echo, and that’s not easy to detect from the normal wiki layout. We also need to be absolutely certain that no vandalism gets approved on summaries, because even one instance of a smart speaker reading something offensive out loud (especially, for example, around kids) could be a huge deal and jeopardize wikiHow’s position as the go-to resource for how-to help through this kind of platform.
With all of that in mind, Scott/ @Agent86
, @ElizabethD
, and various other folks have been working on a way to put summaries in a separate “Summary” namespace page that’s associated with each article. To go with it, there’ll be more of a structured user interface (accessible from the Admin tab), which will allow the editor to write the summary, select whether it shows at the top or bottom of the steps, and designate a “last sentence” lead-in to the article (that won’t be read by devices like Alexa and won’t be included if the summary is at the bottom of the steps). When a change is published from this interface, the changes will be autopatrolled, and it will also add a template-like feature to the bottom of the article itself, to let others know there’s a Quick Summary; the summary itself (and information about its location on the article) will be kept on that other namespace.
As this project continues to grow, you’ll likely see wikiHaus folks fiddling with the exact wordings of the summary, the section titles, and the location, as they gather feedback and compare data on each one, topic by topic (much like they’ve been doing already from the article section). This process is all about refining best practices for all summaries, while also improving each article, one by one.
The folks at the wikiHaus do very much want to keep this feature as open as possible for community editing, too, within the reality that we can’t keep it open to all vandals and newbies because of the raised stakes for these summaries (particularly when they’re read aloud in a room full of kiddos, for example). With that in mind, at this stage, access will be open to boosters and admins, since they’re users who’ve already shown their conscientiousness and willingness to learn best practices around the site. In the future, with your input, it’s not out of the question that we’d change this or create a more distinct user group for it (as we have done for Q&A). It’s all an evolving work in progress… but this is where we’re starting experimentally, by rolling out the engineering changes and admin/booster/staff access. Hoping you’ll all be willing to try it out for a while and see how it all goes. We’re bound to find bugs and issues to fix, so we need to get that ironed out first of all, for sure!
Let us know what you see once it goes live. In the next day or two (most likely tomorrow), you’ll see the UI available to boosters/admins from the summary section Edit link and the Admin tab. Once the bugs are ironed out, Scott will run a script converting existing summaries to the Summary namespace format as well. It’s definitely a “work in progress” - but pretty exciting to think that these experiments and feature changes will hopefully bring us into more and more homes across the world… another way to fulfill our mission, even as more and more people seek advice away from the computer screen!
