If you are like me, you are starting to shudder every time you open the community dashboard http://www.wikihow.com/Special:CommunityDashboard
and see how many unpatrolled changes we have on Recent Changes (RC) Patrol; 500, 1000, 1500 and earlier today 1782!? All those numbers make me terrified! And I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one weeping over my keyboard. While in the early years at wikiHow (you could also call those dark years the “pre @BR
era”) we regularly had over 1000 unpatrolled edits for weeks at a time, over the last year we have usually enjoyed seeing under 150 unpatrolled edits . So what happened? Surprisingly the cause of our RC (Recent Changes) woes has been 2 good things. First, for the last two months we’ve been experiencing a *huge* surge in traffic. This surge was magnified in the last few days as a Google algorithm change boosted wikiHow, while downgrading our competitors. Our readership has never grown this fast in wikiHow’s 8 year history. That is of course a great thing! Our mission is to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything. We’re making great progress by now helping tens of millions additional people! The flip side of more readers is that we are getting more edits and more new editors who don’t perfectly form their edits yet. More edits are of course a great thing, but our growth in edits have outpaced our growth in recent changes patrollers. This imbalance puts a noticeable strain on RC patrol. Second, mobile phone tip adding and tips patrol has become an immensely popular new activity at wikiHow. Again this is a case of long term good news with some short term bad news. On the good news front as wiki, we *want* more and more contributions and contributors. When tips patrol is done well (which typically means deleting 60-90% of the tips submitted) it does add some gems of insight to our articles. In addition, mobile tips adding and tips patrol is the single most successful feature we’ve ever built for attracting new editors to wikiHow. Last week we hit 93 new editors who made it to their 10th edit in a single week. That is an all time high and more than double what we were doing in the pre tips patrol days of early January. That’s a big victory that bodes well for the future health of our wiki. If history is a guide, in time many of these new editors will learn the intricacies of wikiHow, “graduate” from tips patrol to RC patrol and thus help RC get under control again. Unfortunately, in the short term we have many new tips patrollers who patrol in too many bad tips. So the insertion of low quality tips from tips patrol adds one more thing that RC patrollers need to rollback. For the next few months, we are going to be battling an overload of unpatrolled edits on Recent Changes. If it’s any comfort, take some solace that these tips patrollers that we are rolling back today are the potential RC patrol champs of tomorrow. I know it’s hard to see that now though! If we can hang in there and kindly coach these new tips patrollers and editors, we will see improvement in their work more quickly. So if you are an RC patroller, let me bow down and offer you my most sincere thanks. This means you @BR
, @Isorhythmic
, @Illneedasaviour
, @Nick56x
, @Zoeke913
, @CoffeeLover
, @JuneDays
, @GoodSaw
, @Harri
, @Jordan
, @Rosejuice
, @Loiswade42
, @Maluniu
, Lutherus Shyrilser, Adelaide 1230, Harry White Dewulf, @Frostmaker84
, @Savannahcordova
and anyone else who has been rocking RC patrol! If it weren’t for you guys, wikiHow would have dissolved into a puddle of goop over the past week. Hope you guys can keep up the good work while we coach the new editors we are getting. I dream of a day we get back to sunny skies on the RC patrol weather report on a daily basis. Please join me in thanking our heroic RC patrollers as they deal with surge in edits our wiki is lucky enough to enjoy! PS One way we are going to improve tips patrol is to build a tips patrol coach like exists in RC patrol. This awesome idea was suggested by @Isorhythmic
in another thread. Unfortunately our engineering schedule makes this months away, but in the meantime anyone in the community can contribute examples of tips we do and don’t want to see in RC patrol. Submit your examples of good and bad tips here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15zJlChMpH75EI4T3fr8c087kjn8cD5U-WFUlvIEIxWg/viewform
1 Like
Whoa! It’s so awesome to know we’re getting a lot more readers and editors than before! I’m excited to see a lot of traffic coming in. Kudos to every RC patroller working hard to lower the number. I’ll actually admit that I’ve been staying up a lot later patrolling–at around 11 pm to midnight PST, the number is often in the 900 - 1500 range. (Hope that doesn’t make me an addict?!) Although we might not see sunny skies for a while, I think it’s definitely worth the all the work now that wikiHow is gaining more and more popularity. If you’re participating in the battle, be sure to have Tylenol or aspirin nearby!
The idea of a Tips Patrol is great and I really have high hopes for it. I just found a diff page and I’m about to submit it. Is it alright if we send multiple examples if we find them along the way?
system
3
Ok, well good news is RC Patrol is in the 270’s currently.
Like Illneedasaviour, thanks to the people who help keep the patrolling number (or as I like to call…Animal) under control. I haven’t been patrolling as much, but I’ll definitely get back into the groove of things. (; June Days
@Illneedasaviour
Yes, please do submit many, many things to the tips patrol document: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/15zJlChMpH75EI4T3fr8c087kjn8cD5U-WFUlvIEIxWg/viewform
We will need hundreds of examples to form a good tips patrol coach so the more the merrier!
Just thought I’d to show this off: 
Today was awesome because we had tons of patrollers!
Wait, wait, wait… the RC Number is back to sunny skies as of writing this! I went to bed with about 300 left…we’re at 62. Awesome work patrollers!
Marina
8
Yeah, the numbers been shrinking considerably in the past few days. Lots of new people coming in, too. We’re at 118 right now!
