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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for October 8th:

:rocket: What’s happening?
Engineering has started work on responsifying the community tools! This means that the tools will respond to the size of the browser you are on. We will likely update a few at a time and share them with you, so we can all test and make sure that everything is working as it should.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Emily, Scott and YOU!
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
The goal is to have all pages on wikiHow responsive, so this is the next step in the process.

:rocket: What’s happening?
Two new wikiHow courses are in the pipeline. One is on raising your credit score [for 20 and 30-somethings in the US] and the other is on using Zoom [for beginners who didn’t grow up with computers]. If you match the criteria for either of these and are interested in beta testing, please email me ( jayne@wikihow.com ) and I can pass on your info onto the team working on the project. Beta testers will be required to fill out a feedback form, to help improve the course before it goes live.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Krystle, Halle, and Kady are working on these courses.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
The goal of courses is to offer a deeper learning experience for our readers.

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When the engineers update the community tools, are they also going to be fixing some outstanding bugs that those tolls have in the process, such as the scoreboard counting issues?

And, is the Community Dashboard also getting the responsive updates now? What about the editing page, or pages in other namespaces, such as the Template and Image namespaces?

Also, I’m assuming that with these updates, that some mobile only versions of tools, like tips guardian and mobile RC Patrol, will be going away and rolled into the responsive versions of the tools?

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I’m not sure if the responsiveness and issues like leaderboard numbers are interconnected - but I’ll definitely bring that up with Emily so it’s top of mind:slight_smile:

The dashboard will be one of the last pages to be updated - it will be after all the tools are updated, but it will be done, as will all other pages in the long run. The goal is not not have any pages that aren’t responsive.

We are still determining what to do with mobile-only versions: what do you think? Would it be good to keep an RC lite for people who don’t yet have an account to be able to help out with basic RC Patrol rather than the full version?

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That sounds good. Thanks for the reply.

As for the mobile-only versions of the tools. I would consider rolling them into the responsive version of tools. For example, for tips guardian, I would roll it into Quality Guardian, and when Quality Guardian detects that it’s a mobile user (who is not on the desktop site), then it would only display tips to be approved. For RC Lite, I don’t really know much about that tool, so I can’t say. Does it actually mark as patrolled/roll back edits based on the choices that a user picks in the tool, or is it just a learning tool? I’ve never seen any indication of it working when I’ve patrolled recent changes, so I can’t say much about it.

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Same goes for tools that are currently mobile-only such as Unit Guardian coming to desktop? Any idea @JayneG ?

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Everything sounds very cool:slight_smile:And one question, what exactly counts as “meets the criteria?” I’d love to be in this beta testing thing for Zoom, but just wondering what “qualifications” I’d need.

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@R2_d2000 that’s a good point about RC Lite, as it doesn’t log them if you’re not logged in! For Tips/Quality guardian, I know they’re not going to roll it out until all edits look good on the various sizes, so I’m not sure if it will differentiate or not - but that’s a good consideration.

@EpcotMagic great question - I think it would be nice to see Unit Guardian available on desktop too. That decision hasn’t been made yet, but I’ve passed the idea on.

@WikiaWang the ‘criteria’ is simply what’s in the brackets above, so for the Zoom course, it’s for beginners who didn’t grow up with computers (likely older generations).

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(Heads up to @JayneG : Keep in mind that the Unit Guardian choice is available in the Community Dashboard settings on the desktop site.

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thank you for letting us know