wikiHowToImprove: A Resource and Analyses on Edits in Instructional Texts.

Instructional texts, such as articles in wikiHow, describe the actions necessary to accomplish a certain goal. In wikiHow and other resources, such instructions are subject to revision edits on a regular basis. Do these edits improve instructions only in terms of style and correctness, or do they provide clarifications necessary to follow the instructions and to accomplish the goal? We describe a resource and first studies towards answering this question. Specifically, we create wikiHowToImprove, a collection of revision histories for about 2.7 million sentences from about 246000 wikiHow articles. We describe human annotation studies on categorizing a subset of sentence-level edits and provide baseline models for the task of automatically distinguishing “older” from “newer” revisions of a sentence.