I’m not sure if wikiHow takes suggestions (sorry for posting this if you don’t) but I was thinking that it might be useful to have a sort of word count when creating an article. For example, it could tell you if the number of words that you have typed in a specific step is a bit too short, or a good amount, etc. I feel that this would help people to know how much detail that they need to put in so there would be less stub articles.
The word count isn’t really contingent on whether an article is a stub or not, it is whether the article has the needed steps, tips, and warnings to accomplish the task it describes. Sometimes (too often, in my opinion), the page becomes too long and complicated, or veers off-topic until it is almost useless to a reader trying to accomplish a task.
Marina
3
^I often find that this happens with articles about psychology and mental health. I do think a word count would be helpful, but not necessarily correlated with quality of articles. Keep in mind that the changes made on wikiHow all come down to the engineers’ time to work. The impression most of us have and have been told is that the engineers are pretty booked.
Anna
4
Marina is right that we have a small and busy engineering team, so there’s often a lot of tough prioritization that has to go into brainstorming and building new features. Still, I do love hearing about different people’s suggestions, because it can be so neat discovering how different people use wikiHow in different ways! Some of our best features have come out of this kind of brainstorm, so it never hurts to throw it out there
One thought for this suggestion: one workaround for now might be to do some of your editing in a text editor, before copying/pasting back into the edit window. I actually do that a fair amount myself, just because I prefer the interface of a text editor over the edit window… Maybe if you do that for a little while, you’ll get a better sense of how a word count does or doesn’t change your editing flow and/or improve your contributions?
Being a very wordy wordy person myself, I know that using more words isn’t always more effective, hah - sometimes the opposite. In the context of how-to advice, I think it’s pretty topic dependent. Some topics do great with a lot of detail, and word count (if the focus is on quality of advice, not just quantity of words) might help as one indicator of how in-depth a topic is. But on the flip side, just adding words for the sake of it is probably not a good idea for quality, like Bob and Marina said - and I fear a word count might encourage that. Trying your idea out in the “real world” by using the word count in your text editor could be a neat way to explore how it helps or hurts the quality of your contributions. If you give it a go and find anything surprising after you’ve tried it a while, let us know!
Hmmm. I’m just joining in. I don’t know how it works but all I’m aware of is that it’s a good one.
