Welcome to our new series on What’s Cooking in the wikiHaus lab! These posts will go over some of the experiments and tests happening in-Haus. There’s always a lot of innovative ideas being thought up to help keep wikiHow relevant and top of mind for our readers, so here we’ll go over some that are being implemented. Here are a few of the projects the wikiHaus is working on right now:
1. What’s happening?
Experimenting with updating some introductions to add more personality. You can find an example here
.
Who’s working on it?
Chris-H is heading this project, so you can see the tone of voice he is adding to some of these.
What’s the goal of this?
The goal of these tweaks is to help make introductions more catchy and to connect with readers a little more, so it pulls them into the article further. We think a more friendly and empathetic tone might make wikiHow more helpful to readers, who often are using wikiHow to solve frustrating or difficult problems. We also hope that the more engaging intros improve click-through rates in Google search. If you’d like to work making some catchy intros of your own, feel free to share them with Chris who can add them to our tracking :)
- What’s happening?
Content editors are removing expert green boxes and incorporating information back into the article content. Sometimes, it’s as simple as just adding a citation because the information was already stated within the content! You can see an example of this here
.
Who’s working on it?
Carrie heads up the content team, with Britt, Sean and others working to move content around within articles.
What’s the goal of this?
It seems that readers weren’t responding to expert green boxes and that they were potentially problematic for mobile readers, so combining the content back in will hopefully make it easier for readers to simply follow the article steps.
- What’s happening?
Over the last couple of weeks, some work has been going on in the background to see if we can move the current wikiHow Forums to a new platform. The initial testing was completed last week and now we officially know that we can move from Vanilla to Discourse.
Who’s working on it?
Gaurang is the primary engineer working on all the backend details, with Emily and myself helping out. Gaurang is the perfect person to handle this project because he was a community member for over 7 years before joining the team! We are also excited to ask for input from the community as soon as it gets to a point where it can be tested and we need to make some decisions.
What’s the goal of this?
The goal of changing to the Discourse platform is two-fold. The first is about security and safety of the forums. Our current Vanilla integration is custom and very complex, which makes it difficult to upgrade, leaving the current version pretty out of date. With the new platform, we can easily and quickly update the software whenever needed as it will be hosted on Discourse. This alone will make our engineers much happier! The second point is that it will allow for a much-needed refresh and modernization of the forums. There are a range of simple features like emojis, drag and drop images, and the ability to ‘like’ a post that I think we will enjoy :)
