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Welcome to the wikiHaus Lab update! Here’s what’s new for September 24th:

:rocket: What’s happening?
We are continuing to look into what happens to readership when the title of an article is changed. Although we previously thought small changes (like hyphens and capitalization) were ok, after further time and analysis, it seems that even small changes to urls are negatively impacting readership, as you can see in this graph . In order to find a solution - so we can still make needed title changes - Chris is going to test making small title changes using a special move page that updates the title without changing the url. If this works as intended, then we can open up the page for boosters/admins to be able to make title changes this way.
:mag: Who’s working on it?
Chris, and now all of us!
Special Request:We would like to collect a range of articles that need small title changes - things like hyphens, capitalizations, apostrophes and such. We have a form HERE that you can fill out if you have an article (or 10) to submit for us to test with! Please ensure it is already published and is live on the site.
:dart: What’s the goal of this?
We want to make sure that readers can still find our articles when they are searching for how to do something!

:rocket: You may have noticed:
We have extended the test with Q&A content on individual pages - Q&A pages are now available on 500 articles around wikiHow.

:rocket: You may have noticed:
The Trustworthy Experience page has had a refresh! Check it out here .

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I noticed the question and answer pages, and I quite like those. If I saw an answer on an article that I like, and I want to revisit it, the search feature helps.

One question though - how’s the wikihow pro membership experiment going? Are there plans to move forward with the real thing anytime soon, if ever?

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I have a question. When a pages title is changed, and the article redirected, does the old redirected article get locked behind a login screen, or is it set to noindex?

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@That21PilotsFan membership ideas are still in the works and there will likely be some more live testing coming up.

@R2_d2000 Chris H helped me with this one; apparently it gives a 301 http response, so when anyone lands on that page, it just goes to the new page. If anyone goes to the “redirect=no” view, then that is a login screen.

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Well that’s really strange, from what I understand, a 301 response should tell the search engines to move the page in their listings, and it shouldn’t affect search rankings, but clearly, that is not happening for some reason.

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Yeah, it is pretty puzzling! Chris thinks that it could possibly be that the redirects affect crawling of the page, and maybe that’s what’s causing some issues.

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Everything looks nice! Just got a question (or maybe it’s a request). Although I know that there’s this general public consensus that wikis aren’t reputable, but do our content managers actually review each article, or is this just there because some articles are reviewed so it’s there to help improve our reputation?:smiley:

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The page is saying that we work with experts to ensure that the content on articles is accurate. Currently, the team is focusing not only on reviewing new articles, but also reviewing established articles. We now have the majority new articles written by the content team expert reviewed before going live. Of course, community-written articles are reviewed by boosters, not experts - but we can pass them on if it’s a topic that would benefit from an expert review:slight_smile:

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And there’s no harm in calling boosters experts too haha-

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Thanks!:smiley:Gosh, wikiHow is developing fast!

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Is this similar to using {{DISPLAYTITLE:}} but without the ugly wikitext?

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Yes, it works in the same way - it would change the title without changing the URL:slight_smile:

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Maybe get it so that DISPLAYTITLE can display any title, not just some titles. Or maybe fall back to underscores for spaces. I don’t know:man_shrugging:

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I have a question. If the articles title is changed with the tool that only changes the title, and not the URL, will we still have to link to that article using the URL title, or will we be able to use the title that is displayed on the article? I know that allowing linking through the displayed title would probably require engineering work, but I would prefer using the title that is displayed since I typically copy and paste the article title when I am linking to it.

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That’s a great question @R2_d2000 . If we went in this direction, we’d likely figure out a way to update internal linking so display titles would work as well:slight_smile:

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Whats cooking in the lab?image

Yes that is a breaking bad joke.

Jokes aside, interesting to see some of the new features that may be coming.

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