It’s wikiHow’s birthday today. We began this journey on January 15th, 2005, and here we are now, 14 years later. wikiHow is actually old enough now that our youngest community members hadn’t been born when we first launched… that’s a milestone!
This time each year, I like to put on my founder’s hat and reflect on how far we’ve come. We’re a community of builders, so one way to do that is to look at what we’ve built together.
As a community, we’ve created over 142,096 English articles that are out there live, helping readers every day. That core of all that is wikiHow wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t put our heads together to share our advice, experiences, and research on all those topics (with more in the works each day).
Those pages have been human translated and localized to create 369,625 live articles on our international sites. This year, we added Turkish as our 18th site, reaching a whole new corner of the world.
But what we build doesn’t stop with article creation. Together, through efforts of our community of volunteers and staff, we’ve laid the groundwork for expert co-author/review/testing stamps on 33,818 articles. We’ve answered 513,436 reader questions. We’ve built and refined a library of thousands of step-by-step illustrations, photographs, and videos and hundreds of quick summary videos. We’ve come up with tools, many of them based on your ideas, to allow people who’ve never edited articles before to contribute to our how-to manual in big and small ways. We’ve made systems, many of them driven by your suggestions, to gather reader feedback on which articles, visuals, samples, summaries, and answers are helpful and which aren’t, so that we can fix, fine-tune, and improve as we go. We’ve developed apps and services to allow us all to access wikiHow on phones, tablets, and smart devices. I truly think we’ve built a multi-faceted, helpful how-to manual that takes the user way beyond reading an article on a computer, and we’re still building it.
That’s a whole lot we’ve built in 14 years. As I reflect, though, I can’t help but think that we’ve built more than those pages and tools and systems. We’ve built a community here - not just of you guys in the forums and of us at the wikiHaus, but of millions of readers who look to wikiHow for help every day. We’ve built a reputation as the go-to resource for many of life’s problems - big, small, aspirational, inspirational, mundane, or wacky. We’ve built a place where people can come for help without being judged and can offer advice without being ridiculed or shouted down. We’ve built a home for knowledge philanthropists and knowledge seekers alike. That’s what I’m most proud of around here.
We wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without the help, input, expertise, and feedback of all you. Thank you for being a wikiHowian, and thank you for building with us.
We’ve got further to go and more to build, so on to year 15… What do you hope to build this year?
