About Wiki How

About Wiki How

 

History

On January 15, 2005, the two owners of eHow, Jack Herrick and Josh Hannah, started wikiHow—a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual. While eHow already contained instructions on how to do thousands of things, wikiHow allowed a community of volunteer contributors to build something even bigger and better. On April 28, 2006, eHow was sold to Demand Media and wikiHow was launched as an independent site on its own www.wikihow.com domain.^[8]
wikiHow reached 50,000 articles on January 27, 2009.^[9] On March 11, 2011, the number of how to articles hit 100,000. 112 users are administrators, and three are bureaucrats.^[10]
As of November 2011, there have been over 7,224,751 page edits, there are over 127,479 articles, 387,490 users, and 1,099,137,196 page views.^[10] As of August 2012, there are over 143,000 articles.

Content and article format

Workshop on women on wikiHow at Wikimania 2012.

wikiHow is a wiki, which is a website that anyone can edit. wikiHow operates on open source software and an open content licensing model allowing free use and community ownership of the content.
Any visitor to wikiHow can create a new page and write about how to do something. Articles posted to wikiHow follow a standard format consisting of a summary, followed by ingredients (if any), steps to complete the activity, along with tips, warnings, required items, links to related how-to articles, and a section for sources & citations. Pictures may be added to the articles to illustrate important points or concepts. Once the page is submitted, other visitors can edit or improve the page. Anonymous contributors and the wikiHow user community work together to improve the quality of information provided on the site, fix or remove incorrect instructions, and revert vandalism.

Deletion policy

wikiHow's deletion policy^[11] prohibits articles on topics that are advertisements, spam, inaccurate, jokes, potty humor, sarcastic, sexually charged, hate/racist-based, mean-spirited, impossible instructions, social instructions impossible for an individual to accomplish, universally illegal, copyright violations, below character article standards, focused on recreational drugs, political opinion promoting or criticizing a particular political party/candidate/official, vanity pages, or extremely dangerous and reckless.^[12]

Business model

The site's initial start-up costs were to some extent financed from Herrick's sale of eHow. It is now funded from advertising on its pages, on the grounds that "...tasteful advertising is the most unobtrusive way to fund our operations."^[2] It does not seek contributions, asserting that solicitations are annoying, and it is run as a "hybrid organization" – a "for-profit company focused on creating a global public good in accordance with our mission".^[13]

Licensing

wikiHow's content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (by-nc-sa) license, which means that the content can be modified and reused for non-commercial purposes as long as the original authors are attributed and the license is not substantially changed. The authors retain full copyright to their content and may publish it elsewhere under different licenses. They grant wikiHow an irrevocable license to use the material for any purpose.^[5]

Opt-out ads

wikiHow is one of only a handful of major websites to allow readers control over whether advertising appears alongside content. Readers can block ads for 24 hours by clicking the "hide ads" button.^[14] Those who are registered and logged in do not see ads,^[14][15] unless it is an external video provider.^[16]