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11 years after starting wikiHow, I still wake up every morning trying to think about how we can better accomplish our mission. Helping everyone on the planet learn how to do anything is more than just a passing interest for me. It’s a lifelong quest. It’s my life’s work. The less charitable would call it my obsession.

When I started wikiHow, my ability to contribute to our mission was really pretty limited. I was able to hire Travis (our first engineer) to hack up the beta version of the site.  And I was lucky enough to persuade Krystle to work part time for the site in between her college classes and her day job at a bookstore.  All 3 of us were working hard towards the mission, but realistically our mission impact was pretty small.  After all, it was just 3 of us.  Then all these amazing volunteers started showing up and helping out in their spare time! It was incredible. In the years that followed, more and more people joined the community and we started making a real dent on our mission.

I continued brainstorming ways I could contribute.  I set wikiHow up as a hybrid organization driven by ad dollars–one that wasn’t funded by venture capitalists or controlled by a board of directors–so that I could have the flexibility to focus completely on the mission doing what I’m good at: innovating. I knew I could spend all day writing and editing articles myself…or I could put together a team of people with different talents and skills who could, by working full time, accomplish 100 times what I could do as an individual. That’s how today’s wikiHaus staff came to be.

Today I’m still trying to innovate and explore new ways to make our mission a reality. I work alongside this awesome volunteer community, and also with staff at the wikiHaus who help me maximize my contribution to this project: keeping the lights on with servers and technology, writing and translating articles, spreading the word through press and social media, creating photographs and illustrations, and so much more. There’s been a lot of trial and error but I know that what I’m doing today through the wikiHaus is much better than what I’d be doing if I contributed by myself.

Over time, people and organizations outside in addition to the wikiHow community and the wikiHaus have started contributing to our mission, too. We now have Facebook and Internet.org helping us reach people without internet access. Through that partnership we’ve served 5 million sessions to people with limited internet access. (Wow!) We have professors at Universities using wikiHow in their classrooms.  Credentialed experts are helping review our content.  Heck, even a few celebrities like BJ Novak, Bethany Hamilton, and Mark Cuban are helping out. Content partnerships, search engines and social media sites help get the word out. A few governments have helped distribute wikiHow content to their citizens to get crucial information out (Nigeria did this during the Ebola crisis for example).

It blows my mind how many different people and organizations are chipping in toward the same mission in very different ways.  Have you ever heard the phrase “All roads lead to Rome”? That’s how I feel about our mission. All these efforts, big and small, gradually push us further along our path. Together, all these diverse elements make a pretty powerful team:

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There’s some wonderful overlap, too. @Elocina has volunteered at schools teaching kids how to use wikiHow, and @Adelaide ’s mom uses wikiHow for a writing assignment in one of the university classes she teaches. Several volunteers like @Flickety @Lojjik and @Choicefresh have become employees and interns at the wikiHaus. Can you think of any other ways we can “cross-pollinate” this one big team toward the mission? Collaboration has always been at the heart of wikiHow and I’m sure there are more opportunities for teamwork here. What are some additional ways non-profits, governments, experts and schools might be able to contribute to our mission? Either by adding knowledge or spreading it? I’d love to hear your ideas.

All in all, cheers to all of you for being a part of this crazy, ambitious and noble mission. Not everyone can say they get to work on the same team as a global community of volunteers and organizations working toward the same goal. That makes me feel really good and I hope it makes you feel good too:slight_smile:

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Kudos to everyone =D Wikihow has truly gone a long a way. Thank you for starting this site.

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That is an inspirational message, @JackHerrick . 

The one suggestion that I have is to use some engineer time to develop tools for sharing information and methods between contributors. If collaboration tools were able to be shared easily, more new wikiHowians might join the effort and each individual’s number of quality contributions per unit time might soar. It might not be much at first, but I envision a snowball effect. 

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Amazing message! As for ways that others could contribute, perhaps there could be school competitions, for example ‘Which school can write/contribute to the most articles in a given amount of time’, and winning schools and runners-up could receive prizes like wikiHow certificates or book vouchers.

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One of my reasons to keep wikiHowing is the ability to spend time with this wonderful community, connect in a more personal way at meetups, and ultimately give back to the world by teaching people how to do things. Thank you Jack for sharing your message! You have definitely crafted an amazing community here. @jackherrick

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Not sure if the wikiHaus has been considering this already, but this is something I’ve been thinking about for some time.

If education is an integral part of our mission, how about working with scientists and academics as part of the expert review program? As far as I know, we have experts in areas like medicine, law, psychology, and sports, but not in the natural sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy.

In recent years, science has definitely reached larger audiences through pop culture (TV shows like The Big Bang Theory , movies like Gravity , the availability of science and nature documentaries on video-streaming services like Netflix) and the greater use of social media (astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has a big follower base, and NASA regularly updates their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram pages to bring astronomy content to many people). Given the recent trend of expert review, I can definitely see how working with reputable people in various scientific fields can help some of our articles achieve consistently high quality. For instance, articles about saving endangered species, stargazing, and understanding climate change can be reviewed by conservation biologists, astronomers, and climatologists respectively.

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It would seem that education is the mission, not an integral part of it, and drawing in qualified people from any topic is going to increase wikiHow’s footprint and quality. I don’t think the focus should be on academic disciplines, and in reality, academic disciplines will always be serviced more effectively and comprehensively through academia.  The aim of the mission has always seemed to me to reach people without the means to learn academically, or to learn about topics academic sources might not teach about. Basic things like building, growing, using things that many would never need or even know about, learning about cultural topics, even how to be like (insert latest fad persona here), or tens of thousands of topics.  Those who know about things have an opportunity to share their knowledge, maybe even spread their passions, and those who need or want to know have a source to learn from.

Two things that seem like they might help reach more people would be to offer condensed versions, since high speed internet is more available in places where more of other resources also exist… so those in the back wood have less bandwidth to dedicate and less resources like libraries and educational resources to ply for the needed information.

The second is akin to the first, and as Jack said in the first message, is apparently already being offered on a limited basis. Is there a way to offer offline content to people who need it? Print seems too cumbersome, and would depend on the person’s ability to read, particularly in a local language, but there might be ways to offer limited content electronically, in flash drives or disc form?  These might be limited to urgent needs, but then again, from a humanitarian viewpoint, urgent needs should be met first.

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Thanks for starting the site! Glad to see it’s gone a long way and we’ve been able to go from being fairly limited to being absolutely unlimited!

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Very inspirational! It makes me happy that we got to work with such a awesome site. Glad to see everyones effort is paying off hardcore, every good edit matters. Special congrats to @JackHerrick who started his from scratch.

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Thanks for the notes everyone!  And really thank YOU for making wikiHow possible:slight_smile:

For those who asked how wikiHow reaches readers with low bandwidth…over the past year we have made several changes to make wikiHow more accessible for people with very limited bandwidth.  In fact Facebook promoted us recently as a model publisher and encouraged other publishers to copy some of our techniques. I described what we did to make wikiHow more accessible at the Facebook F8 Conference in April.  Video here:


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I read all this with interest. Will think on and come back if I can think of anything useful to contribute.

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I could see WikiHow working with the Autistic community regarding our autism articles.

Autistic people are a very misunderstood population, especially because so many “autism experts” work hard to shut us out of the discourse, and say terrible things about us. The net result is a group of people fighting to support each other and longing to be understood.

What WikiHow offers is a more level playing field, i.e., it’s a lot harder for multi-million-dollar organizations to shut us up. Individual voices are valued and uplifted. The community cares, respect is a priority, and bullies/trolls are not allowed to run amok. People can do a lot of good here.

Right now I see a lot of autistic people writing about autism on tumblr. If more of them started writing at WikiHow too, I bet we could get some really fabulous resources. WikiHow could be a go-to place for autistic people and loved ones who are looking for information, from suspecting a diagnosis to handling everyday life in an autism-friendly manner.

Now, we just have to figure out how to get the word out there.

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I realize this is a bit late to the conversation, but for some time now I’ve been considering ways to use wikiHow to teach kids how to do technical writing. In the past I didn’t have much area to experiment with that thought, but now that I’m graduated and my family is pretty involved with the local homeschool group, it may be a possibility.

It also would be a nice platform to use for some lessons of a photography course. Or possibly art lessons (both using knowledge from the site, and then adding knowledge to it later on). If anyone else has ideas for incorporating wikiHow into an informal group lesson setting, I’d love to hear them.:slight_smile:

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You could have individuals read wikiHow articles on a topic and share the best of them with the group. Individuals who try to follow the steps and report results, then, as a group improve the article, as needed.

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@JackHerrick Happy Fathers day from wikiHow your brainchild and hope you enjoy backpacking with your daughter this weekend. 

I am happy to follow along the green-brick-road and help push wikiHow the right way.   I think that by being innovative and focus on quality content wikiHow could be a powerhouse I’m sure that as we continue improving so will the influence we will have and with it comes the power to endorse other sites that support wikiHow with their own mission. 

One other suggestion regarding revenue would be to gather a group of people with experts on different fields or abilities and focus on local, or international social issues or problems. We could compete with some organizations and universities for grants and funding from governments all over the world and help people who can’t reach us.

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^ bump?

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Bumping isn’t quite the same in FC and GC.:slight_smile:Bumping a thread is considered okay as long as you’re contributing some thing new to the conversation.