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Welcome to the latest wikiHaus Lab update. Here’s what’s new for March 11th:

:rocket: You may have noticed:You may see that Community Q&A is currently not available on articles in the Health category. As we’ve mentioned before, Google takes content on “your money or your life” topics very seriously, and can penalize sites with non-expert or verified information on serious medical, financial or legal topics. We have recently been advised that this is a potential problem for wikiHow that may be affecting our readership not only in health-related topics, but in other areas as well. Unfortunately this means that we’ve had to take a broad measure for now that has removed Community Q&A on these articles.

Although it’s currently not available on any health articles, this is likely to be overly general and we’re hopeful that we can bring Community Q&A back to a number of different articles within the category once we have completed an article-by-article review of pages in the Health category.

This is a deeply frustrating situation, since we genuinely believe in the quality of answers provided by our trusted community members. We know that your experience and knowledge is as valid and informative as anyone else, but we haven’t yet figured out a way for Google to also understand that. The overarching goal is always to get as much information into as many readers’ hands (or eyes) as possible, which means that, for now, this was an essential change.

:rocket: What’s happening?
We now have some evidence that articles using the list style format (like How to Pass Time in Class ) are doing even better than our traditional formats in terms of search and finding readers! They are even showing up quite regularly in featured snippets, which is fun to see.
If you are working on an article that might fit this format (less step-by-step and more a collection of suggestions) you might want to consider this style. Once you’ve created the article, just let me know and I can get the backend styling set up. We will also work on some guidelines for boosters handling articles like this if it becomes a popular style for community authors.

:star: Coming up:The engineering team is hoping to have some time to start responsifying more community tools coming up. Because the time may be limited, we’re interested to hear from you as to what tools they should prioritize. What tool would you like to be responsified? Is there a tool you’d like to be able to use on mobile sooner rather than later?

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Is it possible that we can get a magic word for these types of articles once the guidelines are better established? For example, just like Parts and Methods have a magic word (_ _ PARTS _ _ and _ _ Methods _ _ respectively [I had to add the spaces to the underscores because otherwise they would not display]). I think that for the list format, maybe something like _ _ LIST _ _ would be good? At least then it would be easier to write these types of articles.

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I think that’s a great idea - I will make a note of it to check if it’s possible to create down the line:slight_smile:

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Side note: You can type backslash to escape formatting (i.e. \_\_MAGICWORD\_\_ → __MAGICWORD__).

I agree we should have magic words to affect the formatting of articles as well as a more advanced DISPLAYTITLE solution to alter the title to whatever we want, although the second one is not on topic, apparently all that is needed for custom DISPLAYTITLE is for the $wgRestrictDisplayTitle variable on LocalSettings.php or GlobalSettings.php to be set to false.

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*cries about the dozens of questions I answered in the health category*

All jokes and grievances aside, I think after you were saying the sites can be penalized for it, I understand where it might be better to have it removed. I’m sure some pretty wacky stuff comes through question answers, and especially if someone is looking for serious medical advice, that could be a harmful thing to keep that up and running. This isn’t with the Health category, but I noticed one time on a tech article that someone answered a serious question with the instructions on how to delete the operating system on Windows. The question at hand had nothing to do with deleting the OS.:joy:

But I digress. I think all of these are good changes that will help further wikiHow, and I would honestly love to see something like Welcome Wagon usable on mobile, since I welcome fairly often when I’m not buried in homework and would quite enjoy the convenience of being able to welcome from my smartphone.:slight_smile:

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I still don’t get how Wikipedia is able to have (sometimes unverified) health information in their articles and rank high on Google/Bing. Why can’t Google just treat us like Wikipedia and rank us high anyway:joy:?

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Two questions:

  • Are the answered questions on health topics still in the database somewhere? People like Luna and I have answered so many questions in the disability topics - and some of those required personal perspectives, like “How do I tell my parents I think I have XYZ?”. If they’ve been permanently deleted, that’s thousands of Q&As gone, and I’d really hate for that to be the case.
  • What’s the ideal size for the list-based articles? I was wondering if maybe the articles on how to survive middle and high school would make for good list topics, but they’re so long! Obviously we’d need to shorten them anyway, but it’d be good to know how many suggestions readers like, so that we can figure out what articles could best fit this format.
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Very valid questions!

  1. Yes, 100% everything Q&A related is still in the database. It’s just being hidden from the article pages at the moment.
  2. These are great topics for the list format. Chris suggests no fewer than 5-6 items, with a max of about 20, and a sweet spot probably around 10-12. That feels like a good base guideline:slight_smile:
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I did some looking myself and it appears that the community Q&A is still visible on some topics by prefixing /Questions/ before the article, like https://wikihow.com/Questions/Deal-With-Anti-Vaxxers . Apparently not true anymore :\ [edit to add some]

I hope Google and Bing treats us as a wiki community. Our information is far more reliable than information you find elsewhere because we compile information from trusted sources. Just like Wikipedia has a history of being very credible, wikiHow does too. Not saying that hoaxes do not happen, they do, but they are far less prevalent on wiki sites than on other sites.

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You know, trying to stay on-topic. Why don’t we try another look at questions in health: A question’s answer can only display if there’s a creditable citation that’s shown which the answerer has to answer to publicly show it? QA’ers would then have to check for the validity of the answer via that page, as well as the credibility of the source in general. Maybe I’m straying, or maybe my explanation isn’t doing it justice. Not too sure here, answered a few questions - seldomly.

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I also like the idea of having some sort of verification, like a credible site. My only concern is that sometimes things don’t have something you can cite as your source, because it comes from personal experience (like “How do I tell my parents I think I have XYZ?”). There are other questions that could also fit the “no credible source” issue depending on the audience or stuff that isn’t widely addressed in medical literature or diagnostic criteria (like “What does chronic pain feel like?” or “Do periods affect ADHD medication?”). So it’s a good idea, but it might not cover everything.

My idea, if I could throw it into the ring here, is maybe whitelisting some existing Q&As that fit that “personal experience” criteria and aren’t extremely medical or armchair-diagnose-y. I see so many potentially disabled kids and teens asking for help with talking to their parents, and a doctor doesn’t always know how to answer those - many of them primarily see younger kids whose parents are willing (even if hesitant) to take them to assessments. Telling a kid how to bring it up to their parents is personal advice, not medical. Though I don’t know if Google would see it that way.

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Thank you for bringing ideas and possible solutions - I don’t think we know what the future of this looks like just yet, but I’m happy to pass everything on and see how we can help this moving forward.

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At the risk of spamming this thread, I have another question. Are only the “collection of suggestions” lists doing well? One of my drafts looks more like the “Your Most Common Questions Answered” lists, and I’m not sure if I need to rework it.

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That’s what these threads are for, so don’t ever worry about that! We just had a presentation on the data from different styles and it does look like the others are doing well as well, so go for it!

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I like the idea of the List Format. It sounds like it might work for a lot of my library articles. Unfortunately, that means I’ll be writing more library articles.

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No ‘unfortunately’ about it! it’s great that a new format is inspiring!

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Oh…and… it’s 2021. Lol.

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When I first joined wikiHow, the “list style” was the one I wanted to follow considering how it looked to me. It’s great that it’s considered by the team and the staff.

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This is just my opinion, but if the engineering team has time, I would personally like the bug that removes the “edit” and “history” links on the wikiHow_talk: pages to be fixed. That bug is extremely annoying in my opinion, and I would be very happy if it was fixed.

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I hear you! I’ll mention it, though I can’t guarantee any updates on that.

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