Why are so many poorly written hubs featured?

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   sleepylogposted 10 years ago

   I can't understand how poorly written hubs make it to featured status? I'm not talking about just the odd typo which we all make, but I'm talking about hubs that are so badly written that the terms and expressions used aren't even used by native English speakers. The worst offending hubs are those written by non-English speakers. It bothers me because those hubs bring down the quality of HubPages which affects those of use who write and spell properly. When will HP admin start to crack down on such hubs and stop them from being featured? It makes me mad to know that I work hard to write a quality hub when I see featured hubs that shouldn't be featured. Hubs are supposed to be written in English, PROPER English. Am I the only one who is bothered by this?

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   1. 87

      WryLiltposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      The QAP is based on both automated assessment and the hub hopper I believe. Because of the sheer volume of hubs published every day, the tiny team at Hubpages can't moderate every single hub, so the best thing to do if you see a hub like that is report it.

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         sleepylogposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         I do, believe me I do, but I wonder how much attention is given to reported hubs.

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            WryLiltposted 10 years agoin reply to this

            I believe it depends who reports them. From my understanding, reporters who have a high "correctness" rating have more weight with reports. And in the weekly newsletter there is now a section telling you how many of your reports resulted in an action

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               sleepylogposted 10 years agoin reply to this

               Thanks WryLilt, I'll have to start reading the newsletter hehe

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               Marcy Goodfleischposted 10 years agoin reply to this

               I agree that the 'correctness' rating varies from Hubber to Hubber, but unfortunately, it's not based on the level of quality in standard usage, it's based on the threshold of quality HP has determined can slide by and still get published.  I report anything that would get kicked out at a magazine or newspaper, which I feel is a fair standard to apply here.  But my success rate of reporting problems that end up getting moderated is less than 40% - not because I report things that are actually good quality by print-industry standards, but because HP's threshold for publication is not as high as that standard.
               
               That bothers me, because it makes the site far less professional than I'd have assumed it would strive to be.  Apparently, you can get a hub published with average ratings of 6 in the QAP.  Since its based on a 10-point system, that's like publishing 'D' papers at a university.  These articles would never make it through the editors in standard publications.  But that's one of the problems, editors either enter corrections or send the story back to the writer to be rewritten.  And writers who consistently submit low-quality work are fired. But HP does not have the staff to do that, and has a ton of never-reviewed content still in the system.

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                  sleepylogposted 10 years agoin reply to this

                  Thanks for your input Marcy and I agree with you entirely that HP's quality standards should be stricter, especially in regards to the English language because, hubs that sound like they were written by Google's translation tool (and so many of them do) will quickly lose their credibility among English native speakers who read them and this will reflect on HP and all of us who do have a good command of the language. Other similar sites such as Squidoo and InfoBarel have much stricter language standards and this problem isn't really an issue there.
                  
                  I haven't checked my success rate but I'll keep an eye out for it in the next newsletter. I'm interested to see what it is.

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   2. 87

      Simone Smithposted 10 years agoin reply to this

      Yep!
      That, and we have yet to apply the QAP rigorously to a lot of older Hubs (there is a sizable backlog to go through).
      All reported Hubs are reviewed by moderators, but only those who do not meet our publishing standards will be unpublished; those that simply wouldn't get sufficiently high QAP ratings, but have not yet been reviewed by the QAP, will not have any action taken against them until they are actually reviewed by the QAP.

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         sleepylogposted 10 years agoin reply to this

         Thanks for your reply Simone, boy I bet we keep you busy with all our complaints

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