Photo: Flickr user lifeontheedge

Friday, July 27, 2007

How to Make a Grilled Cheese Sandwich With an Iron.

That's from wikiHow, which has improved about a million-fold since I last checked it out. Let's count the ways:

1. The interface no longer looks like it was created by an engineering student circa 1974. If you've got a good adblocker (a big if), it's nicer on the eyes than Wikipedia itself.

2. At the bottom of the page, there's a list of the page's authors and a link that lets you write them a thank-you note.

3. Likewise, there's a visitor count on each page. I wish wikipedia had that hadn't turned that off; I'd love to know how many hits the article I started in 2003 has gotten.

Basically, wikiHow is showing signs that it actually understands how to run a wiki (unlike, say, Wetpaint).

2 comments:

llywrch said...

The Mediawiki software does have support for tallying the number of reads an article gets, but its been disabled on many of the Wikimedia sites since at least 2003 due to preformance reasons.

I agree with you though, Tlogmer, & I wish this feature was enabled once again. Knowing that people read their articles might provide Wikipedians some needed positive reinforcement.

Geoff

Tgr said...

Displaying hit counts on pages would mess up caching. Displaying them separately should be possible though (actually, WikiCharts does that already for the most popular articles).