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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for November 18th:

:rocket: You may have noticed:The wikiHow PDF Toolkit
When the team was working on the PDF download feature, they decided to create another tool that can help readers with PDF files. The PDF toolkit is free for all readers and aims to help solve some of the problems people have of converting, merging, and managing PDF files. It’s currently linked on articles that have “PDF” in the title so that people coming to wikiHow might be able to solve their PDF problems without even leaving the site!

Right now it does have limited functionality, and some options are simply tracking clicks to see what is most needed by our readers. However, over time they are hoping to build out more features.

If you know of any common PDF struggles that aren’t covered in the Toolkit, let us know and it might get added to the build-out list!

:rocket: What’s happening?The engineering team is working on implementing a bot blocking system. Sometimes bots make a lot of requests to the site in a given period of time, which puts stress on our servers and can hurt our readers’ ability to access the site. Because of this, we’re looking at blocking some bot activity entirely.

:rocket: What’s happening?The new course on misinformation in conjunction with the UN Verified Initiative launched today and is now live and available in 6 languages! As I mentioned in a previous update, we’re excited for another great collaboration to provide important information that is free for everyone to access. Check it out HERE . You can choose to either have a lesson emailed each day over 5 days, or download a full PDF of the course directly from the page.

:rocket: What’s happening?Content Team Tests:The updates to introductions to focus on reader intent have been generally well-received, so you may see more of these happening in different categories coming up.
Additionally, the Bottom Line section may get tested in a new area underneath the introduction.

:arrows_counterclockwise: Update:The updates to wikiHow.pet are officially live:slight_smile:

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Wait…wait is this?

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WAIT OMG:scream:it’s a wikihow website about pet things! @JayneG when did this get uploaded and created?

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Wow! The PDF Toolkit sure looks cool! I might try it sometime:slight_smile:

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Finally! A PDF converter that I can trust. But I did notice that one of the features that are coming soon are URL to PDF and URL to image. I think that depending on how this is implemented, it could be used by students in schools to bypass the website filter, which may result in the website filter companies blocking wikiHow to stop that. So that might be something to keep in mind if that feature is implemented.

I also like the idea of the Bot blocking system. I’m not sure exactly how to go about that, but even though I’m sure the engineers know about this, I though that I would share these mediawiki.org pages for everyone here if they want to see them: Manual:Combating spam and Manual:Combating vandalism .

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Possibly a stupid question, but what impact would this have on wikiHow or the volunteer-facing end of the site? I know we have an autoblock that will hit anyone pinging the site too many times in a short span of time, like if you use some automated tools in AWB, but it’s not clear what impact a bot-blocking system might have otherwise. (I imagine bots like CategoryGuardian and Wikivisual would be exempted, but other than that, I can only think of this hitting AWB, which we don’t really support anyway.)

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@BENDrowned it’s been around for a while now, it just got a refresh:smiley_cat:We have a few different alt domains, like wikiHow.tech, but we still edit their articles on the main site like usual.

@R2_d2000 thanks for the feedback, I’ll pass it on.

@anon74718567 it wouldn’t have a visible impact to the volunteer-facing side of things, this one is more just about improving security and reliability of the site.

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Super cool! I’ll check it out:open_mouth:

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If I find a bug with the PDF Toolkit, should I report them here, or in the bug reports section.

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Is my PDF Toolkit activity (like what files I upload, output files, etc.) saved? And if so, is it linked to my wikiHow account/IP?

(just asking for the sake of privacy and files being linked to me)

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Oops, I deleted my message on accident, and I can’t get it back.

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@R2_d2000 Let’s go with a new thread in the bug reports section (I magic’d your message back)
@FlowerPower555 No, no files or person-specific data are saved on our end. The only thing tracked is how many times a button is clicked, but who it was is not tracked.

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I think I’ve seen some of the Bottom Line sections being tested up top on articles. Can I suggest that we test some that aren’t entirely in bold? The ones I’m seeing are entirely in bold, and it feels a little bit “textwally” and hard to read.

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Yesssss! A PDF converter, on wikiHow? That is something that I’m going to be using a lot.

The bot blocking system sounds nice. I do recall that there was this one month a couple years back when a ton of spammy bots started vandalizing (that was before me, of course).

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I was looking forward to the UN verified course. I will take it soon.
The pdf page looks neat. I loved it.
Well done with the pet domain, keywords and other buttons.:slight_smile:

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@anon74718567 Jordan mentioned that because it’s a test, they’ll all be the same for now, but will see how it performs and go from there. It might be something to test in the next iteration.

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My response is simply that variety is the spice of life:slight_smile:

(More seriously, I’m guessing it’s not possible to run simultaneous tests to see what readers like better?)

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A/B testing can check for more than one variable at a time, but alas, this is not an A/B test, so just the one option for now:slight_smile:

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please share with me PDF converter