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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for November 5th:

:rocket: What’s happening?
Article experimentapolooza continues! The content team is testing out some new articles that answer a particular question in a short and succinct way, such as in Why choose liquid eyeliner? and Is it better to do static or dynamic stretching before a workout? Here, a reader can easily get an answer to their question within a paragraph of text.

:mag: Who’s working on it?
Carrie and the content team

:dart: What’s the goal of this?
This format is in response to Google’s featured snippets, which now highlight answers on a website. You may have noticed this feature when you click on a website from Google search - the part of the site that’s pertinent to you is highlighted in yellow (which is kind of amazing!). It seems that Google is looking for succinct answers when someone searches on Google, so having short and sweet articles on wikiHow may help readers find answers quickly!

:rocket: You may have noticed:
Over the last week the wikiHow team launched the new course on raising your credit score. If you’d like to check out this course, feel free to send me an email on jayne@wikihow.com and I can send you a special link to access it:slight_smile:

:mega: Announcement:
The first of our community tools have literally just been responsified! Feel free to check out Answer Questions and Answer Requests on mobile and desktop screens. If you happen to notice anything unusual, feel free to submit it to our bug form HERE .
Please note: Although Answer Requests is responsive, the article creator itself is not yet responsive. This will happen at a later date.

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Can I ask a weird question?

I know we have to diversify our article types to get Google picking us up again, and I have no opposition to that… but how is this going to change our formatting guidelines and general article setup? If it turns out that these non-how-to articles are what get us discovered on search engines again, that’s going to end up changing our policies and formatting standards, since not everything is written in how-to format or has different title setup. How is that going to work?

We’d have to change the site name. We’re not wikiHow anymore, we’re just wikiArticles. /s

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@anon74718567 that’s a great question, and one that I’ve contemplated as well! It’s possible if these do take off that we will need to change some policies/standards, but it’s not something that we’re actively working on at this stage. It’s all a bit of a “what if” scenario at the moment!

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Random question:

Today I’ve been noticing that the search bar isn’t functional. Like, if I search for anything it doesn’t match anything. Is this part of new experimentation and updates?

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The search function issue is a separate issue. It’s a bug that the team is working on getting fixed. Fingers crossed it’ll be back soon!

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Oh, okay! Thanks for letting me know.

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For the new responsive tools, what if we find a bug that was probably in the tools before the responsive upgrade. Should it still be submitted through the form, or should we use the bug report forum section?

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You can still use the form - that way all tool bugs are in the same place. I got your responses in the form, so that’s perfect! We did catch the columns going out of alignment as well when testing, but it turns out it was like that originally, so I think it’ll stay as is.

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Is wikihow down? I mean like thats the lastest news I can give ya because wikihow can’t load while everything else can load.