How To QC A Task

Mahalo's "Quality Control Team" is a specialized group of users who have been selected to help our staff approve Mahalo Tasks completed by the public. Quality Controllers (or QC-ers) are compensated the equivalent of half of the price of the Task (so checking, improving and accepting a M$3 task is worth M$1.50).
In order to be selected as a QC Team member, a Mahalo user's work has to maintain the highest quality standards possible. If you wish to apply for the team, first ensure that all of the pages you manage and all of the tasks you submit meet all of Mahalo's quality standards, and be sure to study our How to Build a Mahalo Page guide thoroughly.

Step 1: Select a Task to QC

Members of the QC Team will have a new task within Mahalo Tasks by the name of "QC Tasks" - This will open up a list of Mahalo Tasks that have recently been completed by users. The Mahalo Dollar amount associated with the Task is what the user will earn once the task is accepted, as the QCer, you will earn an additional tip worth 50% of what the task was worth.

So if a user completes a Task worth M$3, the QC Team Member will earn M$1.50.

QC team members can only claim 1 task to QC at a time.

After you click the "Review" button from the QC Tasks tab, select the "Perform Quality Control for this Task" button, this will pull the task from the available QC Task list and allow you the freedom to QC at your own pace.

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Step 2: Understand the Task

Before beginning your Quality Control assignment, read over the task and understand what was asked of the writer and the amount the task was worth.

Most tasks seek a Guide Note and Fast Facts to be written, you can consult, How to Write a Guide Note to learn more about the standards of these sections.

Also consider that many task assignments are drafted from templates and that some items may not be relevant for a particular task. If you notice something from the assignment outline missing from the task, do not reject the task unless it is essential to completion of the task.

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Step 3: Perform Quality Control on Guide Note

With the knowledge of How to write a Guide Note, perform the main task of controlling the quality of what appears on Mahalo Pages. The main component you want to watch for is that the writing does appear opinionated and personal. For example... Where a user writes "Wheat and rice are two important grasses we use everyday" you would want to encourage the writer to not use the term "we" and the word "important" is a term that will need to explained and cited or eliminated.

Also important, you want to fix any spelling and grammatical errors that can be found within and check for plagiarism. Become knowledgeable of the Copy and Pasting on Mahalo Guidelines and reject any task which does not follow the copy and paste rules.

Sources need to be quality official sources, this means Wikipedia and other user generated sources are frowned upon and should only be used when necessary, like when a user generated sources is mentioned within the guide note.

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Step 4: Providing Feedback

We hope that there is not much a need to reject a task, when you reject a task you are discouraging users, we hope that you can accept 90% of the tasks you QC. In a lot of cases with minor errors as the QC you should correct the errors and still approve the task. Within the feedback section let the writer know what changes were made and encourage them to consider the corrections for next time.

When you do need to reject a task, be sure to be encouraging and empathetic as it could be a new user who does not know the Mahalo standards yet. You want to link the user to as many helpful pages that will help them learn about their errors.

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Step 5: Create, Correct and Curate

After you approve the page, you must visit that page and fix any errors that may have occurred during the Task-to-Page transfer process. Some issues that appear often include sections doubling up in the Guide Note, you will need to delete those sections. Do what you can to make the Guide Note the most presentable for the viewers, the example to the left shows how even newer text sections can be created to make the Guide Note more clear.This is also the time you want to categorize the page and create re-directs.

Re-directs are important because only QCers and Staff have the power to do this, the page manager will not be able to do this and it is up to you to create fair and appropriate re-directs. The most common is adding the plural or singular version of a term. "Food Coupons" and "Food Coupon" should both result in the same search result.

This is also the time that you want to do a quick once-over of the links section of the page and remove any inappropriate links, videos, images etc... This section becomes the responsibility of the page manager (the writer you are QCing) and a friendly reminder or suggestions on how they can improve this section can be added to your QC feedback.

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Additional QC Information

1. Check that each section has the proper information. Reviews in the review section, complete fast facts, related pages etc.
2. Check for plagiarism. This can be done by taking snippets of written material then performing a Google search on it, using quotes on both sides of the statement. Pull a few sentences from each section.
3. Check for inlinks. Are all dates, companies, names, titles, products etc inlinked? Anything that can be a potential Mahalo Page should be inlinked.
4. Are movies, books, ships, video games, newspapers and magazine titles in italics?
5. If you accept the page, note it in the Google Docs for that particular barnraising.
6. When accepting or denying a page, be sure to use positive words. Let the users know what they can do to make their next submission better.
7. After the page is noted in Google Docs, visit the newly created Mahalo page.
8. Move Fast Facts underneath the guide note, and other sub-sections accordingly, pinning each section.
9. Add corresponding categories.
10. Add redirects. Delete extra related pages section.
11. See if there are any other pages you can add this page title to in their related pages section. For example, if you are creating a page for Sears Coupons, add the coupon page to the Sears main page, along with other major retailer pages.
12. Is the guide note image accurate? If not, find an accurate one and pin it to the first slot in the photo section.
13. Anything else at a glance need to be deleted from the page? For example, videos don't normally go on coupon pages, so delete that section. Spend just a minute on the content of the page making sure the content is accurate.