A few weeks ago I detailed how wikiHow was negatively impacted by the Panda 2.2 change to the Google algorithm . http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/1845/details-on-the-decline-in-wikihows-traffic./p1
And what happened since then has been inspiring and incredible. Immediately several volunteer leaders of this community sprang into action and started taking action to improve our quality. Here are just a few of the amazing things I’ve seen happen: * The work on copyediting has been one of the more inspirational things to see. Check out this list of 828 pages that have been cleaned up: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Articles-with-Common-Spelling-Errors-(Done)
In addition to fixing spelling errors, these wikiHeroes have in some cases re-written the entire page. Or just deleting hopeless cases. Huge thanks to @Maluniu
, @Harri
, @Ttrimm
, @Cece123
, @King
Peter and others for this *great* effort. * Some superfluous phrases like “Don’t run with scissors!” have been removed from wikiHow entirely. No reader will miss insultingly obvious advice like this. * 6 weeks ago we had a NFD backlog of around 2500 articles (best guess from my memory), due to the hard work of @Davecrosby
@Jirachi-Queen
@Maniac
@Elocina
@Sara2871
and others we are now down to 17! (Not counting the ~700 NFD|dup list that we need some technical fixes to start working on.) * With the help of the vigilant Copyviocheckbot and the wikiHero @DaveCrosby
we have identified and removed hundreds of copy / paste articles all over wikiHow. In addition, we now have a reliable system to remove copied articles shortly after they arrive on wikiHow. * The efforts on NAB have been awesome. As of this morning we are down to 131 articles in the NAB queue! The dependably heroic @Ttrimm
has NAB’d 2147 articles herself in the last 31 days! Other kudos go to @Krystle
, @Maluniu
, @Cece123
, @Samantha1208
, and @Progressive
for great help in whittling down this list this month. * Expanding stubs is a difficult job, and we have made some progress, but not as much as we would like. Hat tip to @GirTheGreenDog
@Writelf
@Pink_Star
for doing some great editing to move several stubs forward. * We started hunting and removing grammatical errors that we could find with help from a search engine. Hat tip to @Caidoz
@Readingirl
@Rangers31
and @Metsguy234
for leading this charge. * While recent changes isn’t explicitly part of the quality drive, it’s our first line of defence on our quality. Huge thanks to @BR
, @Maniac
, @Cece123
, @Readingirl
, @Tiagoroth
, @Progressive
, @Samantha1208
, @Harri
, AndrewG1999, @SudoKing
and many others for manning the front lines here! * A combination of volunteers and wikiHaus interns has taken the merge backlog down from 3000 articles to ~300. * Quality guardian which helps identify poor images, videos and RC patrols has been on fire. Thanks to @Shadow
dude , @Gniob
, @JKL1234
, 80_Calo , Chippyjosh, @Davecrosby
, @Lunalovegood17
, @Mar_James
and others. * And there have been dozens of other efforts both large (a project to clear the crud out of the entire Club Penguin category) and small (one editor making a few loving edits to one article) that have improved our quality too. When you add up all these efforts across the wiki the total result has been phenomenal. Wondering how you can help? There is a list of projects right here: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Rally-to-Raise-Quality
So what has happened to our readership?I’m happy to report that Google’s algorithms have responded positively to our changes. When we got hit by Panda we dropped to 26 million unique visitors per month. Now we are up to 28 million unique visitors! That’s a great improvement! So let’s take a moment to celebrate our accomplishments! In other good news, 2 weeks ago Panda was rolled out to non-English languages and our traffic in all our non-English wikis went up by 5-20%! Yeah! Thank you to @Elyne
and others! What’s next?Now that we know our quality efforts have been working, let’s keep pushing ahead. Let’s push wikiHow’s quality as high as we can push it. We know there are articles on this site we aren’t proud of. Let’s do what we can to improve our worst articles. If they can’t be improved, let’s consider removing them from the site. Similarly let’s take our best work and make it even better. Even Featured Articles could be better educational resources for our readers. Our mission has always been to create the world’s highest quality how-to manual. We want every page on wikiHow to be the single best page on that topic available on the web. Period. This was our goal before Panda, and it’s still our goal after Panda. Let’s make that vision happen. Your thoughts?Last month we developed a great brainstorm that resulted in lots of ideas which got put into practice. What new ideas do you have on improving quality that we can try? What have you been trying that work well? What ideas are most fun to work on? Finally, please join me in thanking the many, many editors who have done such great work on improving our quality so much in just a month. And please also provide shout outs for folks that I failed to include above!
I’d like to see if there is a way to remove smileys from all articles. Search doesn’t do a good job of finding them.
Great idea. I hate these too. I’ll look to see if we can engineer a way to find these so we can more easily eliminate them.
I think we’re having some problems with the text-speaking type - you know, the ones with 100 articles about looking good, cute, “scene,” etc. with smileys and bad grammar and so on … any ideas about educating or blocking them?
system
8
Fix 'em. That is the entire concept of the Rally to Raise Quality project. If you spend a good amount of time in there, you’ll realize that yes, most of these “issue articles” are targeting in the “youth” direction.
Quality within RuneScape section, you’re up. I’ll make those articles shine like Rising Stars.
Once we’re done with the Club Penguin category, I vote for a RuneScape project.
system
11
AWESOME!
And guess what? As of now, the done copyediting list ( http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Articles-with-Common-Spelling-Errors-(Done)
) now has 969 articles done, not 828 (which was only 3 hrs. ago). Congrats everyone, let’s keep it going!
3 cheers for wikiHow! Thanks to everyone for
On towards becoming the greatest how-to manual on the net!
system
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If there’s enough people “now now” that’s for it, no need to wait. Just drop a bomb on everything at the same time.
^ Win. I already created the RuneScape Improvement Project, but it isn’t quite official yet. I’m collecting sigs on it, if anyone is interested.
Ttrimm
15
ISMKW, you can get some ideas from the CP project.
I’m interested in helping it, I just know nothing about Runescape. Maybe I should create an account just to make the articles higher quality…
Actually, those who don’t play RuneScape can still correct spelling and grammar errors.
I’m interested. 5 year player.
I am not so experienced, but I am not a noob. The total level on my main (I think it recently turned a year old, or is about to do so) is almost 900.
system
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