Shouldn’t the Warnings and Things You’ll Need lists be at the beginning of an article.
- You want the person to read the warnings prior to completing the steps, not after.
- Same for the Things You’ll Need.
I’ve always wanted warnings to come after the most-needed item in a how-to: the steps. And in our case, before the Tips section. As for Things You’ll Need, well, I have to remain neutral. I don’t feel it right for it to be front-and-center, but yet, I don’t feel that near the bottom (where it is now) is right either!
No no no, please
don’t shuffle around the sections of the articles. They’re fine the way they are. I prefer Warnings and Things You’ll Need being at the bottom, because I’d rather read tips first, then warnings, as opposed to warnings, and then tips (why would we even need Warnings first? most tasks on the wiki are not that dangerous, and I feel that putting warnings first would be discouraging). And oftentimes, the Things You’ll Need just consists of things that are already listed in the article, and are sometimes just plain obvious - of course we’ll need a backpack to organize a backpack, for example.
While I’m obviously not tuned in to all the complaints on the site, I also don’t think there are many people who complain about how the articles are currently set up. Why do we need to fix something that isn’t broken?
Example: Format a Hard Drive
. A viewer finishes all the steps, loses data in another partition, and then sees this warning:
“Hard drives can have multiple partitions, so be sure to check which drive and which partition you’re formatting. For example, a C: and D: partition may exist on one drive. It isn’t unusual …”
“Why wasn’t this at the beginning before I completed the steps?”, they ask.
Also, if the Things You’ll Need section’s contents are in the article, the what is the point of listing it at the very bottom?
^ Then that should be weaved into the beginning of the article somewhere, if it’s incredibly important. I also only see one downvote on the Helpfulness that imply that the partitions caused the reader any trouble, and even so, I can’t tell if it was related to that warning because the wording is very vague. I don’t see any reason to shuffle the sections of the article around. If something is really
important, it can just be shifted up into the steps (e.g. “Ensure that you check the partition of the hard drive you’re formatting” or “Make sure that you have [the material you can’t complete the steps without]”). There’s no need to shuffle around all the sections of an article just because of how important a warning is - as I said, if it’s that important
, move it into the steps.
system
6
The idea behind putting TYWN at the bottom was that we didn’t want people to get bogged down in the details before they’d gotten a good overview of the entire process.
In some cases where it is absolutely essential that you have certain items in hand? I’ve sometimes made the first step read along the lines of “1 - Collect all the things you will need into your immediate work space. Please see list at end of this article”. Or something similar.
I think the ingredient lists for recipes came out of this necessity.
system
7
The TYWN (and Ingredients) section is a check list. You can check off the things you have by clicking on the box.
Any articles with potentially damaging results should have those noted in the introduction, throughout the article, or should instruct the reader to read the entire article before beginning the process.
I could maybe understand putting things you’ll need at the front.
With warnings, I don’t know that most of it is going to make sense until you read the article. For example, someone may not know that fire, heat or toxic chemicals are involved until they read the steps so warnings about those things may not make sense to people who haven’t read the article. If it’s really risky or harmful to do something you can say that in the introduction. But, I feel like a lot of the warnings we get can wait until the end, particularly the obvious ones (“don’t burn yourself”).
