I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven’t been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site’s appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders’ dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it’s time to call his experiment a failure.
Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It’s very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.
There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The “expert review” is a joke. It’s only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.
There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It’s not well-suited for that purpose, but they’re children and don’t know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don’t know why he’s still there.
They’re arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn’t notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers’ ability to access an article’s reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.
I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven’t been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site’s appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders’ dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it’s time to call his experiment a failure.
Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It’s very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.
There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The “expert review” is a joke. It’s only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.
There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It’s not well-suited for that purpose, but they’re children and don’t know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don’t know why he’s still there.
They’re arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn’t notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers’ ability to access an article’s reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.