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Today, January 15th, marks wikiHow’s 11th year in the world, and it feels like just a few months ago I was posting about our 10th anniversary.  Back then, I made a resolution of sorts: “What’s next for wikiHow? We are going to keep pushing. Keep getting better. Keep finding more and better ways to give everyone on the planet a practical education. Let’s figure out how we can help the next billion people.”

Looking back and thinking about our progress, I’m so inspired by what we’ve done, collaboratively, to help more people around the world. I was really moved by the collection of Twitter posts we put together of people saying how wikiHow has helped them here . From teens learning practical life skills they were never taught by anyone in their lives, to an 80-year-old professor learning how to infuse tequila, I believe, more than ever, that we are making an impact.

Now, our project has changed and grown a lot over the past 11 years, and so has our community. Some of you have been here from the very start, and some of you reading this might’ve just stumbled across wikiHow today. But no matter who you are, I want THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart for your time, your knowledge, and your flexibility.

Collaboration isn’t always easy, it requires a lot of patience, but it’s our secret sauce. Our ability to grow this knowledge base, try new things and still find common ground is what makes wikiHow special. And that wouldn’t be possible without you, our wonderful community that co-creates and prunes this global knowledge resource every hour of every day.

We accomplished a lot in the past year, so I’d like to try and highlight some of the amazing things our volunteers have done. Three cheers for our community members who…

…played a big role in bringing our NAB backlog down to zero: @Ttrimm @Flickety @Adelaide @SarahB

…started so many high-quality articles: @WildRoseBeef @MissLunaRose @KingQuails

…dramatically improved quality in existing articles: @Donagan @Ruben-Gabriel @Danifree

…have stuck with us so long that wiki is in their blood: @Colie @Illneedasaviour @Elocina @Jordan @Maluniu @Isorhythmic @BR

…did some epic patrolling in 2015: @Technist @GeekySonic @Grahamster @Hailey @Hootooshay

…spread their skills and helped wikiHow in a wide variety of ways: @Byankno1 @Laura0681 @Carolyn-Barratt @Alabaster

This is an incomplete list - I’m sure I missed some people. If you know of anyone who deserves a shout out, please mention them!

In honor of wikiHow’s 11th anniversary, I’d love to kick off a brainstorm with two questions to frame our next year of educating the world: (1) How has wikiHow helped you or someone you know in the past year?  (2) What is one thing you’d like to help wikiHow help people with? For example, I know @WildRoseBeef has gone out of her way to help people in the cattle industry know how to run a ranch; @MissLunaRose has done a lot of work to make wikiHow one of the better resources on the web for people with autism. What is your mini-mission for helping people through wikiHow in the coming year?

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I cannot believe we’ve gone so far! Happy birthday, wikiHow! One of my missions for this year is to improve more of wikiHow’s recipes articles. 

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This is music to my ears. It’s awesome when we help someone and we don’t even realize how important it was to them at that time. That’s really impactful.

Here are some of the articles I’ve found organically through my use of Google and out of a need to learn something:

Humanely Kill a Fish
Treat a Hot Water Spill on Your Skin
Bowl a 91 Pin Strike in Wii Sports
Change the Ball Colour in Wii Sports
Make Ice Cream
Make a Song on GarageBand
Care for a Beard
Build a Fallout Shelter

I’d like to write some new articles this year, not sure on the topics yet. I’ve also been promoting wikiHow to many of my friends and have gotten 20+ of them to like the wikiHow page on facebook. A lot of the time they casually mention to me, “Oh I was just on wikiHow the other day”.

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Happy birthday to wikiHow. Kudos to the team.

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That’s one of the hardest brainstorming topics I’ve had to tackle since I started here about 5 years ago. I don’t generally do much searching for things I don’t know about the world I live in. But since the death of my father, I’ve found some of the poor information my father didn’t teach me when I was smaller (a little younger than my present day age) including how to   Safely Install a Ceiling Fan (which I’m still looking at doing to a bunch of other knick-nacky items around the house).  Having lost someone who didn’t teach me anything about any subject (and when he did it was poorly constructed and I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it and turned to here), I need to focus myself on here in the coming year.

As for that one thing I’d like to help wikiHow people with in the coming year or so, I’ve had two personal secret projects (I’ll expose them since I partially made mention of them before) which include writing articles about visiting theme parks of all sorts and include what people can actually do in each theme park.  Although some of that project is done, there’s still a wealth of information I could give.

My other project (which I have a wealth of articles to begin) include giving readers information on how they can become a fan of certain TV game shows. I’ve started a few of them already. But I have quite a bunch of them on my list, but can never find the time to get these started.

I do have less important “projects” on my list. But for me, I"ve found solace in the tools that are here. I tend to like the desktop Community Dashboard, though I’ve taken a few trips around the mobile Dashboard from time to time.  Traditionally, every day I wake up, I always check my Watchlist. I always find ways to intrigue my mind into seeing just where things are lacking even after it’s been originally stated, edited/fixed and shown to the public once again.

Last year, I had this project which I started (or maybe it was 2 years ago; I can’t tell with these dates with this job of mine offline). I had originally taught myself HTML programming. Last year I officially took a course in it (passed the final with a 97%) from my locals online CTI’s third-party site. I took quite a few trips around the Topic Greenhouse (back when the topic greenhouse wasn’t focused on fixing up stubby topics) and gave most topics I encountered in the short period of time I use it some of the knowledge I learned.

You can definitely say that I know quite a bit about what areas need fixing and areas where things need to be improved. I’ve gone through some changes (some of these changes I’m not very fond of and am currently in the midst of changing offline to make my online “sessions” more appealing to make my time more beneficial to both wikiHow and myself and to make my less seem less miserable. I’ve been dealing with quite a lot on my plate. (I won’t bore you anymore.)

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Happy wikiHow 11th! It’s hard to believe how fast time has flown:slight_smile:wikiHow has helped me with the friendship problems that I’ve been trying to solve. http://www.wikihow.com/Decide-if-Your-Friend-is-a-True-Friend and http://www.wikihow.com/End-a-Friendship are two examples of articles I’ve read. I’d love to help wikiHow help people with dealing with drama, social skills and solving friendship problems.

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Hi @ JackHerrick thanks for the mention here!

1.On personal basis wikiHow has helped me learn new skills from interpersonal skills with the help of @Anna and expanding my computer skills especially regarding the use of syntax. The site has also helped my grandaughter read simple recepies through to making the final dish (sometimes via the floor and back into the bowl again)!

  1. My mini mission for this new wikiYear is to spend more time trying to save some of those articles languishing in the ANB wilderness.
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Happy 11 birthday wikiHow! Thank-you @JackHerrick for creating wikiHow so people can find a great place to find how-to articles. I myself found this site a great place to practice my editing skills, vocabulary skills, and others.:slight_smile:

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Happy 11th birthday to wikiHow!:smiley:

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Wow, 11 years already? This is awesome. I’m really proud of how far we’ve come and how in-depth some of our articles are. Happy birthday, wikiHow.:smiley:

How has wikiHow helped me, this past year? It’s mainly helped by showing me and inspiring me to draw more. The articles on drawing realistic eyes have been very helpful, and just this morning I used the article on how to draw a cat (they’re actually decently hard to draw when you rarely draw them).

It’s also helped me by getting me to keep track of what changes I make to recipes I make, so I can then put those recipes or tips into an article. Similarly, it gives me an area to practice writing exciting introductions.

The thing I’d most like to help readers with is horses, training them, riding them, and caring for them. Some of the horse articles are still pretty shabby accurate-wise, and I’d like to fix that.:slight_smile:

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Over the past year wikiHow has given me something constructive to do in a community! I get bored easily and the wide variety of tasks and topics on wikiHow, mean there’s always something to to keep me occupied, outside of work, housework, TV, Candy Crush Saga and my social life, what there is of it! I don’t want to set myself a mission. The fun of wikiHow, for me, is the lack of obligation. I don’t have to do quality boosting, I don’t have to greet X amount of people, I don’t have to do X amount of patrols or write a set number of articles. wikiHow is my hobby, not my job, do, I will just keep on dipping in and it doing what I like. Thank you Jack. Thank you wikiHow. I for one am glad you’re here.

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Happy birthday wikiHow! Thanks for the mention:slight_smile:We’ve made it so far for such a long time - for this year, I will try to be more active, patrol and create more articles, and understand policies and wikiHow rules better. Hopefully I can also get better at the booster test so I can help boost articles. Great contributions for 2015 wikiHow users! 

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Happy Birthday Wikihow! I will try to be online more often fixing articles about gymnastics, dance, and other interests. Thanks! Other honorable mentions @Vishwavijay -who did a fabulous job editing articles, and being so kind. Also @WikihowSaver -who indeed did a good job saving Wikihow. and @Skyllful - who did a great job on helping users and keeping an eye over Wikihow. Thank you!!

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Happy 11th birthday, wikiHow! I haven’t been a member quite that long, but I’ve still enjoyed all of the time I’ve spent here. Here’s to many more years!

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Thanks for that! Congratulations to everyone and happy birthday wikiHow! It is such a coincidence that wikiHow’s birthday is the same as Wikipedia!

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The most wonderful wishes to wikiHow on it’s 11th birthday!! wikiHow is growing and improving for the better with the lovely community it has. First time I’m here for wikiHow’s birthday and I would certainly like to celebrate for many more years to come!:smiley:

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Thanks so much Mia.:slight_smile:This mention means a lot to me.:slight_smile:I am glad you joined wikiHow and I am sure you will make great progress here.:slight_smile:

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happy birthday

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Thanks @Mia =) 

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@JackHerrick Congrats and thank you for acknoledging my contributions. It sure feels great to feel part of such a great cause. It has just been a few months since I decided to join and follow along the path you and everyone else in the community have started to carve and light up for this and future generations to come. I personally have benefited from wikiHow thanks to some articles on time & self-managing, Relaxation techniques, Habit changing, Leaving a job, Business, carrier field, you hate or feel it is against your own values and beliefs. I’ve come a long way since finding wikiHow, I have found ways to repent for past mistakes and subsequent harm and shame caused by my poor choices. Having access to so much wisdom and knowledge from contributors I have never felt so empowered to achieve my dreams and find that inner PEACE and fullfilment I’ve so much craved for. I also wanted to mention @Vishwavijay for being so helpful and encouraging, @flickety for being such a helpful mentor. @Elocinda for setting an example of quality editing and Awsome articles, @Anna for her always being encouragin and being such a knowledgeable hard worker. @SarahB for her constant vigilance and wisedom. Always so prudent and a prime editor. @Krystle for reachning out and finding ways to get us all involved and fishing/picking brains for valuable ideas from anyone. @Skyllful for his dedicated hard work, I’ve also seen him helping with the French and Spanish sites:wink:… @Pamelanahi for being so efficient and proactive with her work, It’s very inspiring to see her and @RosyGuerra tackle so much work in spanish wikiHow. @Adelaide & @WikiHowSaver for making the community feel so warm and welcoming. now My future Goals and projects will be on: 1. coping and dealing with the Social Stigma on Mental health (I will try and get NAMI members involved with the wikiHow articles, 2. Start - Message in a bottle project - Wich is going to be focused on answering Requests and Nurturing Stubs started by fellow - Active or former contribuitors as a way to thank them for their contribuitions and encouraging more interactions and collaboration across age and interest diversity in the wikihow community. 3. Global/local Non-Internet Outreach, promotion, and education of wikiHow and internet resources all over developing countries. This is something I have wanted to do for many years and I believe that wikiHow’s mission and other contribuitors share this dream. Sadly, Most of the people who have the most need for internet and wikihow’s benefits don’t see the value of this medium. I want to change that!