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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! There’s a lot going on at the moment, so feel free to ask if you spot something that’s not mentioned here and I can find out more!:slight_smile:
Here’s what’s happening for Dec 16th:

:rocket: What’s happening?Kevin, our new Product Manager, and Aaron in Engineering are creating some fun widgets to include on article pages. The first widget, the Circumference Calculator, is now live on 3 Ways to Calculate the Circumference of a Circle - wikiHow .

Are there any other quick calculators or tools like this that you think would be helpful to have on an article?

:rocket: What’s happening?We have a new Astrology newsletter that includes a daily horoscope! Lots of people seem to like our relationship articles, so the idea here is to lean into other fun things for anyone who might be interested in further social/emotional content. You can find the sign up at the bottom of https://www.wikihow.com/Newsletters .

:rocket: What’s happening?The team is testing a small change with how our staff writers appear in article bylines so that some of our editing fellows are also featured in bylines of articles they contributed to. In the past, it used to say “wikiHow staff” on all of these articles, but currently, the names of staff writers are directly in the byline. Right now, there are seven editing fellows being included as part of the test, so you may still see some with “wikiHow staff”.

:rocket: You may have noticed:You may have seen a dark green banner with links to categories up the top of some article pages (that Butterfly mentioned here ). This is a test to see if it helps people navigate to different categories and see how much we have to offer. Right now the test is running in the Relationships, Tech and Home & Garden categories. The overall goal is to help readers navigate, interact with, and explore the site a little more.

:rocket: Update:Article Formats. The list, QAM and Myth article formats are continuing for now. Although I’d love to say “X is now permanent” or “Y is not permanent” the answer is that these are all still experimental, and the team will likely continue to test different formatting ideas into 2022 to help make it as easy as possible for readers to get answers to their wikiHow questions.

With the experimental nature in mind, it has been tricky to know when or if to update the formatting and deletion policies. Although these new formats are not technically permanent, it may be time to consider how we can allow more flexibility within the policies for different formatting options. Let’s think on this and perhaps we open a new thread for everyone to discuss ideas and potential changes.

:star: Coming up:The team is looking to see if readers might be interested in video transcripts. You may see a button on videos that says “see video transcript” coming up. The first step is to collect data on how many people click the button, and then decide whether to move forward with the feature.

:star: Coming up:Kevin is working on a new project regarding relationship articles. Check out this post from him asking for your input and ideas!

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The calculator is really neat. I’m not a math person, so I don’t know about any additional calculators that could be made though. I do think that video transcripts are a good idea. If not at least for users who use screen readers. The newsletters are cool as well, but I did wish that they integrated with your wikiHow account better (I know that this is a long shot though, since most readers don’t have one). Also, just a question, but what happens when you are already subscribed to all the newsletters, but you want to subscribe to the new astrology one. Should I check them all again, or will that cause the same email to be sent at the same time. If I only select the Astrology one, will that unsubscribe me from the other ones?

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@R2_d2000 The word is that you can’t subscribe multiple times to a newsletter, so it’s fine if it’s selected. But it also won’t unsubscribe you from any if they’re not selected when you’re on that page and add the astrology (or other) one. So either way is fine!

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:star_struck:I always love wikiHaus Lab updates; it’s so cool to see what’s happening behind the scenes! I’m particularly excited about the new widgets – they look amazing! Are these widgets currently only planned to appear on math articles (though I have a feeling that calculators on math articles would probably be most useful anyway)? And are the widgets only supposed to be text-based (like we see in the linked article) or are there plans to make other styles? I can think of some ideas – widgets for math graphing articles, maybe a widget to test and edit code on some programming articles, widgets to guide readers through the process of writing specific essay formats (similar to the article creator on wikiHow), etc.?

Ooh, I don’t think I’m subscribed to the wikiHow newsletter, so I just subbed!:smiley:

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This is all very neat, especially the new widget! It does appear that pi is simply rounded to the hundredths, so 3.14 – perhaps there could be an option for more accuracy, so maybe a few more decimal places?

This is just something small I noticed, but the icon for the circumference calculator isn’t showing up in the table of contents:image

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Whooow! I loved the radius calculator. If only all these widgets were there when I was in school:frowning:I bet students will throng around wikiHow once they pick up that it’s there. I would so love other calculators that convert time and date based on location. Like the way you linked a webpage for us to know our time as compared to the wikiHow meetup time. Then, I learned about day time saving time adjustment that my contact from the other NGO I volunteer for mentioned. She said the workshops will now be an hour later, until, I think March. I don’t know a thing about this U.S. time shift. May be an article and such a calculator would help.

Then, calculating area, and all those geometric calculations could be sorted. Most importantly, I’d like to request the time zone calculator for around the world, currency calculator, bank interest rate calculator. The list can get long. But this widget is definitely here to stay.

Way to go with the inclusion of names of the staff on articles. Why didn’t this get started sooner!!! Good luck with the video transcripts, categories banner, astrology newsletter, article formats and relationships project
Go break a leg!:running_woman:t3:
May your year 2022 be full of successful experiments.

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Regarding the widget tests: we’ve actually tested a citation widget before on Cite the Bible . I’m not sure how the reception was towards that, but between the age of that one and the fact that it looks… slightly wonky, is it safe to assume it’s not being included in this test?

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Correct, they’re working on new ones - just the one live at this stage.

The bible citation might need a formatting tweak to remove the method box - passing that on:slight_smile:

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Is the popup for the horoscope newsletter supposed to have an image on it? Because if so, it’s not showing up for me. If not, the alignment of the text should probably be shifted – this looks a bit funny.

Screen Shot 2021-12-20 at 10.35.25 PM
Screen Shot 2021-12-20 at 10.35.25 PM 862×320 24.8 KB

eta: Looking at the actual message, I think there might be an issue with the popup itself? Wasn’t that the lead sentence for the Relationships newsletter popup? (And horoscopes aren’t inherently about relationships, so either way it would probably need changing.)

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So this was put up without an image, but it should eventually get one! It’s definitely is itching for one.

The message is as expected - there is “Want better relationships” and “Looking for love?” - I think this is likely because most of our new Astrology-related articles are based on relationships, and the newsletter may take this focus. This shows that it might need some more focused/clear wording.

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Yeah, I was pretty confused… Maybe try something like “Get your daily love horoscope right in your inbox”? (That doesn’t sound all that great either, but just adding “love” without changing the wording further risks crushing the text once the image is added.)

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