The wikiHaus labs is brewing up another new feature, that asks the question “Should we stub this?”. But before we invest too much time on it, I’d like to figure out if people would enjoy working on a feature like this. TL/DR Version:Here’s how to try this out: 1. Go to this Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag-sQmdx8taXdDFsektsV1p2YjNiZzZWcnFESkFtWXc#gid=0
2. For each article answer yes or no to the question “Should we stub this article?” 3. Let me know if you think this might be a enjoyable tool to work on if we built it in a more slick, more editor friendly feature on the site. Long Version:Starting about a year ago we removed all “stub” articles from search engine indexes. (A stub article is a good start for an article, but it’s not yet detailed and complete enough to meet our minimum quality standards.) This dramatically reduced the odds that a non-registered wikiHow user would find a low quality stub article when they visited wikiHow, which is great! That said, there are still many, many articles on wikiHow which probably need to be marked as stubs, but aren’t. As our quality standards have been continuously rising over the years, many of the articles we once considered decent, we would now consider stubs. Stubbing our lowest quality articles helps us in several ways: 1. It saves us the embarrassment of showing our lowest quality articles to our readers. 2. It communicates to search engines that we take our quality seriously and reduces the odds we get hurt by a “Panda” update. 3. It puts all the stubs into a tidy list that we can eventually focus energy on fixing. So with that said, the wikiHaus labs is trying to build a feature which could help us better identify unmarked stubs on the site. One possible way to do that is to take a list of articles a computer has identified as smelling stubby and then letting community members vote on them, similar to what we do in QG (Quality Guardian). We’ve done a very simple hack at that list of suspect stubs and made a list of 100 of them on the Google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag-sQmdx8taXdDFsektsV1p2YjNiZzZWcnFESkFtWXc
If you would like to try voting on some of these (or all of them if you love it!), it would help me figure out if people want to do this activity. Here’s how 1. Click on the URL, read the articles. 2. Answer “Should this article have a stub tag? Yes or no” 3. Feel free to skip as many as you want. Do as much or as little as you like. 4. Let me know what you think of this activity. If people like this activity, we will try to build a proper feature for it. (I’m imagining it might be similar to QG. Or perhaps we will build this as a feature specifically designed for mobile phones! Who knows?) But after trying it, nobody likes doing this, it will make me go back to the drawing board. So give this a try and let me know what you think! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag-sQmdx8taXdDFsektsV1p2YjNiZzZWcnFESkFtWXc
Pretty interesting. I definitely feel like having a defined list of stubs will allow us to effectively improve the quality in a sort of visual representation.
Maniac
3
If this tool is created and used…well, then what? While it is good to place articles in the categories where they best fit (even if this means giving them “needs help” templates) it seems to me that this will just result in adding hundreds of articles to a stub category that is already filled with thousands of abandoned articles. The stub category on wikiHow is already way over it’s capacity, in my opinion, and very little attention is placed on reducing it. I also find that a lot of articles are thrown in the stub category rather than NFD’d, when the article really lacks content entirely. Every few months I go through every single article in the stub category and usually end up NFDing quite a lot of articles because they literally have no content at all, and should have been deleted long before. This tool would likely just add to that mindset of tagging all articles with stub tags, and then the stub category is going to end up turning into Requests 2.0…great titles, absolutely no content. If something like this is implemented, I would like to see an additional push (probably from the wikiHaus) to work on the stub category altogether. Just like I have said in the past with the overabundance of requests, why not culminate a list of current stubs and throw those titles into the options for WRM articles? As content starts to pour in, we would end up completing two tasks at once: one, adding great content to the site through the WRM editors, and two, keeping titles on the site (from the stub category) that would otherwise sit stagnant on the site for months, or end up getting deleted entirely. All in all…yeah it sounds like it could be a beneficial tool but I think that more thought needs to be placed on the future: what are we going to do with the stub category, then, if we are adding dozens or hundreds of articles to it each week?
system
4
I like it @JackHerrick
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We should use this tool.
I do like the idea and would use it, but I agree with Maniac that if this was implemented, we’d also need to focus on expanding stubs (I would be willing to help with that as well).
system
6
Can we have the same for Wikiphoto and the {{pictures}}? There’s still articles with the template on there since 2008/2009 and kind of concerned that the bot is picking up a lot of very new articles.
Maniac
7
I totally agree. — The systems already exist, but I feel like we are not taking full advantage of them. While I am sure that the proper measures are in place to decide what topics are best for WRM/Wikiphoto, I feel like more emphasis should be placed on perfecting the content that we already have, rather than starting entirely new. Isn’t that the idea of the stub template, anyway? Instead of deleting the bad content outright, we tag it so that other people can work on making it even better instead of making them start from scratch. I think we are better off fixing the problems that already exist (hundreds of thousands of requests, thousands of stubs, hundreds of articles that humans have decided need pictures, and so on) before we begin adding to those numbers even more…but that’s just my two cents
People would prefer starting from scratch rather then working on a stub. As everyone hungers for those view counts on their own articles while displaying on their user page.Am I correct ?
While I agree that there definitely needs to be more of a focus on fixing stubs etc, it’s also just as important to categorise those articles correctly. Not categorising an article as a stub just to keep the list smaller is not a good idea. Categorising articles as stubs should have no effect on the rate at which stubs are fixed - but it will help to keep the rubbish out of search engines, and that, in the short term at least, is the most important goal.
I think it has several benefits. This tool would cut down on the ever-growing list of stubs and allow for a more organized way to find and expand stubs.
I like it, it will help us expand a lot.
Thanks for the feedback everyone. If I’m hearing folks right, the people who tried on the spreadsheet more or less liked the “test feature” and would want us to build it. There were also some meaty issues raised by @Maniac
on what to do with the stubs a tool like this would label. I don’t have an answer on that one yet. My hunch though is that there could be productive things the community and / or wikiHaus could do with them once they were clearly labeled. I also think it’s certainly better to label them as stubs and hide them from most readers than leave them on the site mixed in with our good articles as we do now. @Maluniu
also raised issues about wikiPhoto not getting to articles that have been templated as needing {{pictures}} . I asked Thom Scher (who helps with WikiPhoto) and he told me that {{pictures}} was put on the list of articles for WikiPhoto to work on, but that list may need a re-prioritization. He’s going to up the {{pictures}} lists in the queue, so we should start seeing more of those getting done. On a related note, if you have an article that you really, really want to get wikiPhotos on, the best thing to do is put it on this Google doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dG9YRGF3SklLNjYzVXlqaVFIOG1kZmc6MQ#gid=0
That will get it on the wikiPhoto “fast track”
(Just to be clear the wikiPhoto fast track can still take months, and there are many topics where it just isn’t practical for wikiPhoto to get images.) It can be especially helpful if you wrote an article that you really want photographs on and you can’t take them yourself for some reason. It’s probably not as good as taking the photos yourself, but it’s better than no photos at all!
I did a bunch of the ones in the spreadsheet btw. Had some time since I have basically no homework AFAIK and no class until 12:45.
