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The new NAB, which we have described in previous forums posts as the “Hatchery” concept is launching at some point between today and Friday. In a nutshell: New articles will no longer go into RC Patrol; they will be auto-patrolled and go straight into NAB. Until they’re boosted, new articles will not be reachable by search engines and will be blurred with a notice like this:In the new NAB there are 2 new concepts to understand 1. “Promote” - Pressing promote publishes the article by making it visible to search engine and stops blurring the text. Promoting is the same as “patrolling” the article to graduate from NAB. You should press “Promote” for good articles or those you have fixed enough to be live on wikiHow. 2. “Demote” - Pressing demote removes the article from the NAB queue, but keeps the text blurred and hidden from search engines. You should press “Demote” on articles that would require too much improvement to publish on the live site.-------- Those 2 concepts; promote and demote are the most important new concepts for New Article Boosters to understand. Here is some more nitty gritty for those who want all the details: The NAB list will be sorted so that the highest quality articles are at the top of the list. Thus our bias should now be to promote (aka publish) the articles at the top of NAB since those will typically be the best ones. The very best articles should also be marked with a rising star. A big problem with the old system is that there are so many new articles, and there’s a lot of junk to sift through to find the good stuff. This sorting will make that a lot easier, and is based on an algorithm we’ve already been using to identify promising articles to boost .When boosters review an article in NAB, they’ll have the option to “demote” it, which means it gets removed from the NAB list, remains de-indexed, and goes into a category called “In progress articles removed from NAB”. Demoting an article means that other people won’t see it in NAB, so don’t press the button lightly. Nominating an article for deletion or merging also demotes it. Outside of the NAB tool, if an Admin or Booster finds a great unapproved article, they can also promote it by clicking “Promote” in the Admin tab; this will allow the article to be public and remove it from the “In progress articles removed from NAB” category. A new aspect of this system is that low-quality articles will be allowed to be overwritten if someone wants to write an article with an existing title. The overwritten version will show up in NAB with the date of the overwrite edit, but not in RC. In the page history, these edits will show up as “article rewrite”. This will only be possible on articles that have never been promoted. This is a big change in how new articles are processed and there will probably be bugs! We need everyone’s help in testing this new system. Boosters can use NAB to test the system itself, but everyone can help by educating new contributors and helping them understand how this new system works. This “hatchery” concept for NAB originally started at the London meetup where @lewis-collard @deniseke @zack @gloster-flyer @jaob @ingeborgk @choicefresh @martynp and I all brainstormed on how to to improve our quality. (Original forum post on the idea here: here ) Over the last few months, several people at the wikiHaus, especially @Bsteudel , @ElizabethD and @Anna have been working hard to make it happen. Several early versions of the code were tried and later scrapped till the solution evolved into this version which we think is ready to launch. A few of our most experienced boosters have helped to test (thanks, @Ttrimm @Flickety @Illneedasaviour @Adelaide and @Maluniu !). I’m sure there are plenty of bugs left, but we are excited to roll this out very soon. I think this will significantly increase our new article quality and make NAB a more productive system. Thanks to everyone who has helped get this launched.

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Yay, so excited for this! Can’t wait to see the amount of improvement in the long run:slight_smile:Just a heads up that several NAB-related articles will need to be rewritten, like http://www.wikihow.com/Use-the-wikiHow-New-Article-Boost-App

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This looks like such an intuitive idea and I cannot wait to try it out once it goes live! Question: how exactly do unboosted articles get their “score”? (out of curiosity, haha :P)

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@JackHerrick After an article is “demoted” will it be demoted perminantly?

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Other that that question this sounds like a good idea!

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Glad to hear that this has finally come out.:slight_smile:

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I’ve been trying this out and it’s working great so far! I’ll kind of miss being able to add related wikiHows quickly (unless that’ll be added in the future), but otherwise, I like it.

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@JackHerrick Promote or demote already NFD articles and notified copyvios? (Tagged out of NAB) - don’t want to hit the wrong thing and send it in the wrong direction.

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@GamerKing132 - Nope! If an article gets a ton of improvement that makes it more helpful, an Admin or Booster can promote it by clicking “Promote” in the Admin tab; this will allow the article to be public and remove it from the “In progress articles removed from NAB” category. @JirachiQueen The articles are run through an algorithm that looks for factors like completeness, formatting, grammar, structure, and so on to get an idea of whether a given how-to might be promising or not. It’s not a gauge of accuracy, tone, etc so the human eye of a good booster is still essential! It just helps provide a list where the good and thorough articles can ‘float to the top,’ compared to the old date-ordered boosting list. We’ve been using a slightly different version of it to provide a list of promising articles in the forums for a few months now , and while it’s not foolproof, it does seem to help good stuff get recognized. @Illneedasaviour w00t w00t, updates! I took a first stab at that NAB article, but feel free (anyone) to chime in on it, too:slight_smile: @Maluniu Not sure if Jack’s outlook would differ but my understanding is that demote would be the way to go there. An admin or booster can always promote them from the on-page Admin tab after processing/voting, and this’ll prevent something from accidentally going out live if the template is removed and/or the article passes NFD vote but still needs cleaning up. What do you think?

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@Anna That’s what I hoped to hear!

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That’s wonderful! I look forward to seeing this algorithm come out. I hope to do some more boosting with its launch!

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And we are live: http://www.wikihow.com/Special:Newarticleboost Keep in mind that this is a sorted list with the highest quality articles on top. So almost anything you see on top is likely worthy of editing and pressing the “promote” button. Enjoy!

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In the Potential duplicates section, it says, “If a title below is interchangeable with this new article, consider merging the content or nominating the article for deletion” but the buttons say “Merge and Demote.” NFD/dup isn’t listed in the NFD drop down in the widget on the right…so there appears to be no place to add it. Would an NFD/dup tag have to be added manually then? I agree with Lugia, the Relateds adder should be brought back.

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Also, cancelling a quick edit from NAB removes you from NAB and returns to just the article view. Shouldn’t it just cancel the edit and keep you on the NAB view of the article?

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I just wrote a couple of test articles and found that promoting articles within the Admin tab is instantaneous. I think there should be at least a popup confirmation window just in case someone clicks it by mistake. Also, I’m going to assume the “< Nab_warning_done >” message is a placeholder for now?

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This looks to be a FANTASTIC idea! Many thanks to those of you in the wikiHaus (and possibly beyond?) who worked through this idea and set it up for us all.

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Thanks @Isorhythmic - I passed that cancellation bug on to Bebeth, and she’ll be checking it out! @Illneedasaviour Bebeth jumped right in to fix the placeholder. Thanks for pointing it out! Also, I think I saw your test article and reported it as a bug (“why isn’t this blurred??!”). Hahhaha:slight_smile:Jeff: On the NFD|dup removal, everyone did a lot of humming and hawing about what to do for that, starting with the group of wikiHowians in London and going all the way through this launch. Jack probably has some more eloquent words to offer, but my understanding of the idea behind Hatchery right now is that we can just “worry less” about articles that aren’t ready for promotion and focus on the good, instead. So yep, you can add an nfd|dup manually in the edit window, if you’d like (and demote), or of course you can NFD for any other applicable reasons. But if it passes muster on other NFD reasons, you can also just mark for merging and let it live in demotion-land to avoid the content being lost. That way, dups/merge candidates won’t “gum up the works” of NAB or confuse readers by going fully live – but they can still survive and any good content can be saved or worked into the existing title in due course. Maybe we’ll eventually have some kind of tool to sift through those merge/dup candidates, too, or even a Merge Greenhouse. There were and are lots of difficult questions in relation to the whole Hatchery shift and NAB update, though, and I know getting used to a new tool layout can be rough at first. I’ve had the benefit of playing around with it a little longer while testing and have to say that after a while of use, the tool overall seems smoother, quicker, and easier for me now than our old version did. After using the tool on our test servers, switching back to the live site with old NAB felt clunky! So it’s worth giving it a go for a little while and seeing what you think - and keeping the feedback coming of course, so we can build on what we’ve got here, fix bugs, and make adjustments down the line as needed:slight_smile:Gotta take a sec to give a huge shout-out to @Bsteudel for pouring her blood, sweat, and tears into this project. It’s been a labor of love for quite a while now, and she’s been a trooper about changes and adjustments and reworkings as all of the testers have given their two (and three and four, if you’re me) cents to every feature. So three cheers for seeing it out live:slight_smile:

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Thanks @Anna for the explanation. Sounds good. Any chance of getting the Relateds adder back?

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@Isorhythmic Not sure at the moment! But I can ask. I think their removal was just a question of making Boosting an easier and smoother process, and saving tool real estate and time to focus on actually getting the article within guidelines, rather than stressing about Relateds (which are easier to add if you know the article topic well - e.g. author, stub expander, etc - and which come with a much fuller list from the in-article Manage Related wikiHows tool). Maybe one day, it could also be that the automatic “related wikiHows” from the side rail get used more prominently, or that we create a flow-style/queue tool for looking at and adding Relateds - but that’s just me pondering, not any official plan. I’ll pass on your thoughts about it, though. I can understand missing them!

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@Anna Haha, I was hoping to delete my test article before anyone saw it, but I guess I couldn’t get past you:wink:What about the ability to retitle articles directly from the tool? (especially useful for boosters who don’t have the Move option in the Admin tab)