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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for July 16th:

:rocket: What’s happening?
Yesterday we had the soft launch of wikiHow in a new language - Farsi (aka Persian). This brings our total languages to 19! Check it out here: http://wikihowfarsi.com/
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Vanna and Marissa in the international team have worked hard to bring this to fruition, of course with the amazing wikiHaus engineers, primarily Alberto and Reuben.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
To increase wikiHow’s reach into more languages and spaces across the world - teaching anyone to do anything!

:rocket: What’s happening?
Experiments with Q&A sections. Here, we’re looking to have a new page open when someone clicks on “Show more answers” in the Q&A section of an article. This wouldn’t change the current layout of an article page - it will still show up to 10 on the page, like usual, but then when the reader clicks to see more, it would open a new tab with just Q&A on it.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Emily is managing this, with Trevor working on the engineering side of it.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
The long-term goal here is to find a way to make Q&A really valuable to people who are searching online. We have so much really great Q&A content (a lot of which is created by you in our community), but it doesn’t necessarily all get indexed by google because we don’t show it on the page. Having it all on one page could also potentially help make Q&A more user friendly and we might even be able to add a search function for Q&A down the line!

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YaY! These sound like cool changes!!

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Wow, I love the Q&A idea! Adding a search function down the line would also be a nifty feature; I’m sure I would use that a lot!

And nice to see a new language, too - that’s always exciting!

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And why do we have to make a separate account to edit the Farsi (Persian) wikiHow?

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(thanks to Chris for answering below!)

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And why do most wikiHow language editions say that I’m logged in?

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@Unicorn293829 You don’t need to create a new account to use Farsi wikiHow; you should be able to log in with the same user name and password. Because the site is not on the wikihow.com domain, the cookie that keeps you logged in on most of the other languages (e.g., www.wikihow.com , es.wikihow.com , pt.wikihow.com , etc) isn’t recognized.

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On that note, @Chris_H , what was the thought process behind moving that language version to a completely different domain?

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@Eric We discussed it with the Farsi project manager and team, and they thought the wikihowfarsi.com domain would be a more appealing and clear domain name for its audience than a subdomain.

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All of this sounds great! I can’t wait to see everything thing implemented.

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I’m curious … Most people typically run their PCs with multiple tabs open. I beat my friend who usually has 20 tabs open. LOL

So how will WH tell visitors “LOOK OVER HERE AT THIS NEW TAB I OPENED FOR YOU!” ? And since malmare often pops open tabs the user did not ask to have open, how will WH make these newly opened tabs stand out as “WH-Plus” (sorry, that’s just what I’d call it).

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@CageyCat good point, we wouldn’t want people to think wikiHow was redirecting to malware.

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@CageyCat I think I may have the terminology wrong here saying it will open a new tab - it may just be that it opens a full page of Q&A when clicked on:slight_smile:Either way, I’m sure there will be some testing to see what works best.

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Solving the Google SEO problem gets under all big sites’ skin. There is no fool-proof way. Alienate users with tabs or replacing a window’s content… vs… how to get Google to properly rank pages with unique content. None of it is easy.

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