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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for April 8th:

:rocket: What’s happening?We’ve done some research that suggests new articles on specialized topics can often do better on our targeted sites over the main domain. Because of this, moving forward we’ll be reviewing newly promoted articles and looking at whether they would benefit from moving to a specialized domain. So, you may see new tech articles being hosted on wikihow.tech, for example.

You’ll still be able to access and edit these articles on the main site when logged in, but we hope this will help put them in the best spot to reach as many readers as possible. We can also add images and screenshots on these domains, so you’re welcome to request them as usual via wikivisual.

:rocket: What’s happening?We have been busy creating our first Google Story! This is a new feature from Google where stories we create and host on wikiHow can be shared in Google Search and Google Discover. You can see our first story in beta form here , and you can find out more about Google Stories here .

:rocket: What’s happening?The visual team has been conducting a zero images audit. This audit finds articles with images on less than 70% of the steps, and adds them wherever possible. Research has shown that google indexes pages higher if they have more robust content, and images help make our pages more complete. So, in turn, images help articles get information to our readers more easily than those without.

:mag_right: You may have noticed:Community Q&A is back up for logged in users on health and other “your money your life” articles! This is an exciting development that brings back a wealth of community experience and information for logged in readers that I’m sure will be helpful and appreciated.

:mag_right: You may have noticed:The new slider design is now live on the site. You can see the more squared off design that promotes courses and the newsletter when you scroll to the bottom of articles.

:star: Coming up:Some article samples are going to be incorporated into the Pro Membership. The team is working hard to make sure that samples on important topics that should be open to all readers are kept that way, but feel free to let me know if you see anything that may have slipped through.

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Wow i like the wikistories!What’s the “Pro Membership” thing?

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I have a question. When will we be able to link to articles on the specialized domains?

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I’m assuming there won’t, but will there be some form of input wrt. specialised domains from boosters in the NAB process, or will it just be going via staff?

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@TheReptileCatcher Pro membership is an experiment that includes PDF downloads of articles and access to courses. You can find out more in some previous wikiHaus Lab update posts:slight_smile:

@R2_d2000 I know that would be ideal, but at this stage it isn’t something that’s going to be developed. I’m hopeful it might be something that can happen in the future, but it’s not in the pipeline at the moment.

@GB742 For now it’ll just be staff, but that would be amazing! It’s definitely something to put on the long-term feature requests.
EDIT: it’ll be staff moving articles, but we’d love your input! If you NAB an article that you think would be suited for a specialized domain, just let me know:slight_smile:

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I don’t want to sound complainy or selfish, but could we put some priority on making sure volunteers can do certain wiki tasks, too?

I feel like volunteers have lost a lot of autonomy in the last year, and while I know it’s not necessarily for reasons we can help, it feels like we’re losing some of the core components of a wiki when more and more things have to go through staff. We can no longer make title changes without asking staff, we have to message staff to convert something to list format, we can’t flag stuff for the subdomains, and volunteers with expert credentials can’t hit a switch to expert-answer something (which is much more prominent now that logged-out users can’t see Q&A on Health or Relationships topics). Personally, I feel like it’s making a lot of my interactions with staff kind of “transactional” rather than friendly or community-like, because most of my messages involve some variation of “can you do something for me?”.

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That’s a really interesting point, Alex, and I appreciate you mentioning it. I think because so many of these things are experimental or things that have been implemented pretty quickly, they haven’t gotten to the point of having community tools, tags, and/or non-staff ways to complete them. Having things that are “staff only” as we try things out isn’t meant in any way to exclude or separate volunteers, but I can definitely see how it can feel that way. I agree that it would be great to prioritize this, and I’m hopeful that as some of these things become more permanent, then the ability for volunteers to also do these tasks will come along with it.

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I have another question. Although it is not mentioned in this thread, are the like buttons that are on some articles working?

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They’re still not showing real numbers yet - apparently it’s on the “semi-soon” list to build the feature out completely! Sometimes higher priority things come along and push the fun ones down the list!

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I’ve got a question – now that we’re going to start moving articles over to sub-domains, will the article still exist on the main site, and if it does, when we edit the article on the main site will the changes be synced to the page on the sub-domain?

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I have a question-Can wikihow volunteers (Like me) test out new features and then vote to whether they should be added or not?

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@WikiaWang Yes, anyone logged in can view and edit the article on the main site and it will sync to the sub-domain. So as an example, you can access and edit this article on the main domain (.com): https://www.wikihow.com/Reset-a-Forgotten-Password-on-Windows , but it’s actually hosted on Tech here: 3 Ways to Reset a Forgotten Password on Windows - wikiHow Tech . For logged out users, if you give them the .com link, it will simply redirect them to the .tech page.

@TheReptileCatcher You’re definitely welcome to try out some of our content experiments like writing an article in list format or thinking about different catchy ways to title an article, for example! If you have ideas for new features, we’d love to hear them, but would probably need some consensus before just trying it out, so feel free to either post them in the forums or reach out to me!

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Okay thanks!I have a few ideas for wikihow.

  1. Have a tool that let’s you add photos in places where they need them.
  2. Forums Patrol: So patrolling forums like RC patrol but with forums.
    We can do it by: deleting spam, deleting unnecessary topics and post, removing spam, etc.
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If you’re interested in adding images, you can reuse existing images or upload new ones:slight_smile:

Forum patrol sounds like what admins already do to moderate the forums. If you see something spammy or inappropriate, feel free to flag the post so we can review it.

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Will the articles that are being moved still show up on the user’s page?

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Not Jayne, but assuming this hasn’t changed, the articles in subdomains still appear on people’s user pages. A couple of my articles were moved to the “fun” domain a while back and still appeared on my user page just like normal:slight_smile:

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