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Here’s a heads-up for anyone who likes sorting, organizing and filtering jobs around here… @Guarangprasad has been working hard to bring the previously mobile-only Approve Questions tool to desktop, too. Now it’s officially live on the desktop Dashboard!

You can find it here:

wikihow.com/Special:SortQuestions

The tool should work just the same as the mobile one. Your votes here help us to weed out unhelpful questions before they even get answered, meaning everyone can focus their answering and patrolling energies on the really helpful questions that’ll serve lots of readers well in the Q&A section.

If you’re not familiar with it yet, give it a whirl… and if you’ve been using it on mobile, now you can access it right on desktop, too:slight_smile:

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Awesome, I’ll go check it out!

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Yay! It’s great that this tool is on the desktop. Definitely opens it up to more users. Good thing too, due to all the questions waiting to be approved.:stuck_out_tongue:

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Wow! The last time I used that tool was when I joined! This is awesome! Thanks Jayne!

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I tried it out on mobile, but I’m not a fan of mobile (though I’m on a phone), so I’m very glad! This’ll be nice and helpful!

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Yay! I’ve been seeing this on mobile for a while now, and I was wanting it to come to desktop. Now that it is, I hope that we will now get through the queue much faster.

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I do have a question about this tool. Does it show how other people have voted on a question, like Category Guardian does?

Edit: I started using the tool, and it doesn’t look like it does. But I do have a question, how many votes does it take to approve or delete a question?

Also, if I leave the tool idle for too long, then the results don’t show up in the approve questions log , is this a bug?

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Glad you guys are checking it out!

@R2_d2000 My guess is someone already acted on that item if you left it idle a while, so that’s why it’s out of the queue already and your action isn’t logged… but we’ll keep an eye out for any ongoing issues there, in case I’m guessing wrong!

It takes 2 Yes or 2 No votes in general for an item to be resolved in the queue, with booster/admin votes counting for 2 by themselves.  

This page could prob use an update now, to add the desktop link and maybe the vote count info, if anyone wants to! :)  wikihow.com/Approve-Unanswered-Questions-on-wikiHow

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I love the enthusiasm for this! It’s great to get feedback that these sorts of additions are valuable and well received! 

@Christy17 that’s very true - there are tons of questions to work through! We’re hoping to move it up to the top of the Dashboard eventually and maybe set a temporary mini-goal for it, so we can take bites out of the total bit by bit. However, of course there’s an upgrade bug in the Dashboard at the moment, so I can’t do that until we fix it. But after that!:slight_smile:

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Thanks for letting us know Jayne.:slight_smile:

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I’ve checked out this tool and I love it.

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Good to now! I like mini-goals. They seem to make things much more attainable.:slight_smile:

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I checked it out…probably won’t be my favorite tool but I’ll help out occasionally.

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Yeah, I’ll do the same as Sewing Girl. Since I’m going to school in exactly a week, I probably won’t use the Approve Questions tool as much as I would like:stuck_out_tongue:

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Nice! This is a pretty neat tool but I’m never on mobile version of wH long enough to actually use it.  Nice job drink buddy @Guarangprasad

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Hi @CPenguin17 that’s a great idea, thanks for the suggestion. Adding some examples and explanations could help clarify the process. 

Do any of our Q&A Patrollers want to give it a go? 

Tagging a few recent Q&A patrollers and folks who’ve written about Q&A in the past: @InfernoTerra @ExoticComet @XxVxX @Galactic-Radiance

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Thanks to  @XxVxX  for your work on the How to Approve Unanswered Questions  article - we now have some great examples of both Yes and No votes in Green Boxes in Step 3! 

I hope that helps @CPenguin17 :)  

Of course if anyone else is interested in adding or editing with good examples, please feel free to go ahead!

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I feel the same for @CPenguin17 . Lots of questions I’ve found are not that great, but I still answer them in the best way possible. The only questions I ever skip are duplicated or already answered.