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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for August 20th:

:rocket: What’s happening?
We have been looking into what happens to readership when the title of an article is changed. So far the data shows that small changes like capitalization and hyphenation don’t make a long lasting impact on readership, but that bigger changes can have a significant negative impact on readership that is long-lasting. Moving forward, there will be a note that comes up on more popular articles if someone attempts to change the title. We’d appreciate taking note of it and really considering the change before moving forward. I’m happy to help review potential title changes, as is Chris.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Chris has been working on this analysis.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
We want to make sure that readers can still find our articles when they are searching for how to do something. We also want to make sure that the changes we make to titles are helpful to our goal of reaching as many people as possible with helpful information.

:rocket: What’s happening?
A continuation of testing and experimentation with different article styles. The team will be testing using shorter and more succinct paragraph text in introductions on a few articles, and then also a containerless display, where the article won’t have the grey background on the page. You can see an example of this in this screenshot from the dev site. This will only be on a very small number of articles to see how readers respond.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Carrie for content, Emily for the process, and Scott for engineering.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
The continued goal here is to see whether variations on our standard format and display are more helpful to readers on some topics.

:rocket: What’s happening?
Testing the ability to interact with article methods individually. The team is considering experimenting with a feature to be able to “like” and potentially leave comments about different methods on articles. This gives the reader the ability to give instant feedback and interact with articles.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Emily is working on the ins and outs of this project.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
The goal here is to make it easier for readers to help us know what parts of our articles work best (and which might not be working so well) by commenting on and liking each method. We can then potentially use the feedback to continue to improve articles. This is in its early stages, but I’ll let you know if it goes live!

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Will help us be up to date on things

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That containerless design looks really nice and sleek. I’m excited to see what happens with it.

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Yh me to

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I have a question about the new design. Is the omission of a Table of Contents on purpose?

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I believe so, @R2_d2000 - some analysis is showing that perhaps people are getting stuck or overwhelmed with so much going on up the top of the page, so they’re looking at ways to reduce that and get people directly into the good stuff!

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I’m going to be That Guy™ and quasi-bump this thread to ask - when it comes to the title data, does this mean we have to ask before changing titles on any promoted/indexed articles, or is there still a window in which we can do it without affecting readership? I also see we get a warning if we try to move a popular page - does something similar happen if someone tries to redirect an established article?

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@anon74718567 No, the notice about the popular page only pops up on articles with a lot of readers. You won’t see it for other established articles.

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I’m a bit late, but I really like that new design. I’d love to see it on WH.