I opened an article in incognito to see if it was on a subdomain (it’s not), and noticed that the spot for the “Messages” dropdown was replaced by something called “My Points” (which doesn’t drop down the way the Messages tab does).
Clicking on it brings up a popup box about having earned “wikiHow points” and a prompt to enter your email address, but it doesn’t actually say what these points do.
I clicked through a few more pages logged-out and it appeared on some pages, but not others, so I’m guessing it’s a test. But it’s not clear what wikiHow points are or what their purpose is, and this wasn’t mentioned in the latest Labs post. Is there any information on what “points” are?
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JayneG
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This briefly came up in the Nov 3rd wikiHaus Lab update in the comments and I added the details so far in this reply
. It still hasn’t come up for me in the wild! (though I am generally in logged-in-land) #treasurehunt
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What would it do, though? I know it’s still in testing phases so we might not have a clear idea yet, but given that I missed that part of that Labs post, I experienced it without context, like the typical reader would. Without context, it just ended up being confusing to me.
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JayneG
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I don’t know what it would do at this stage - right now it’s just checking to see if people might be interested in having “points” on wikiHow - so whether people are clicking on it, and whether they’re entering their email and interacting with the idea of points. If that looks promising, then more might be determined - perhaps getting points for reading through an article, clicking on certain things etc, and then redeeming them for membership or courses or…?
If anyone has any ideas for how we could gamify wikiHow for logged out users, feel free to share them
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Could we encourage them to play around with some of the vote-based Dashboard tools, like Approve Questions or Category Guardian? They couldn’t do too much damage with those tools, and they probably already seem fairly “gamey” compared to something like the Topic Greenhouse or a sign-in-required tool like RCP.
it’s not really related to points, but we can ignore that for right now
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I have yet to run into any of these articles in the wild, so I may be a little out of tune with them. But is there any point in accumulating points, or how/why they are awarded. I read that nobody can figure out what can be turned in for - unless I’m missing something. Am I missing something with this thread?
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JayneG
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@EpcotMagic
you’re not missing anythingAt the moment there isn’t anything to redeem points for, because it’s currently a test just seeing whether people are showing an interest in a points system or not (so they are looking at whether people click on the buttons that talk about points and whether people go the extra step to add their email address.) If it looks like there is an interest, then
ways to earn and redeem points will be created.
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I think adding easter eggs would be a interesting; or hidden games which appear after certain conditions are met.
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My only comment is that we might need to be careful with hidden games and/or make them more tricky to access than other “gamey” features, because sometimes students use wikiHow for school (e.g. being referred there by their teachers or looking up homework problems), and anyone who’s seen a classroom of students on computers has seen how many students goof off instead of working. We don’t want a game to be so easy to access that the entire class gets distracted by it – that (in tandem with how easy it is to vandalize the site) could easily get us blocked by quite a few school IT departments!
It could be neat to have little easter eggs, though. I know at one point we were trying to make a koala our mascot… I don’t think that really panned out, but it could’ve been neat to have the koala lurking somewhere on the page, and clicking on it would earn you points, take you to something redeemed by points, or even just pull up random trivia about wikiHow or the article you’re on.
Something else I thought of… Depending on how our merch does, maybe points could be applied to the merch store in order to get discounts? As an example, if someone was iffy on the card game, a discount could sway them to buy it. And if we were to go back to offering other kinds of merch, it could be more broadly applied to other products, too.
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If the userpage has a mention of these points, it would automatically become important. It could be redeemed in any way that seems okay to the staff. Like for instance, these points could be exchanged in return of seeing more expert answers
Getting a chance to have their question answered by a staff or an expert
Getting a discount on wikiHow merchandise, game, tshirt, cap, mugs, puzzles, having a caricature of their signed by the staff etc.
Getting an invitation to the virtual meetup for an hour.
Having an article expert reviewed if they gather as many points.
Getting cast in wikiHow image, game, video etc.
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