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While out and about on the Internet, some of you may have seen low quality “copycat” videos with wikiHow content in them. It’s a common tactic of spammers and scrapers to make videos that copy wikiHow articles, often word for word or picture for picture, and upload them to YouTube to try to earn money from them. This kind of use violates our license and doesn’t give credit to our community of authors. The videos also tend to be pretty low quality, which makes wikiHow and our efforts here look bad.

We at the wikiHaus do our best to follow up on these videos and get them removed. Luckily, after we report them, the channels these scrapers start are generally taken down by YouTube, so they can’t keep at it.

The tricky part is finding the videos… it’s a bit of a detective hunt sometimes. I know some of you have reported these channels in the past, and that’s been super helpful. @InfernoTerra , for example, has reported a ton he’s found through our own Video Adder, and we’ve been able to get them taken down. But there are still more out there!

To make that kind of reporting easier in the future, I’ve made a form so folks can submit copycat videos they find. If you see any, please report them on this form:

Thanks to any and all of you for helping with this, if and when you spot this kind of video:slight_smile:

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Oh, well thanks for bringing light to this. I haven’t seen any of these videos on YouTube, even with all the time I spend on there, but I will look out for this…I hope these people give up on copying wH!

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Oh hey. That’s me! I’d just like to add that in general a scraper video will be a robotic voice repeating the wikiHow article word for word with no deviation. Most times there’s an annoying tune that plays right before. Happy hunting out there! I should go check Video adder myself. Haven’t done that in a while. 

@Caeiia Yeah. Generally they’re such low quality they don’t have any views or likes so you wouldn’t find them unless you were looking for them. Generally. Some I’ve found have had a lot of views. 

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I cut the cord a whiles back, so I have a bookmarked list of streaming sites, along with YouTube, so I added a new bookmark link >.<;; Will keep an eye out!

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Should videos that are made and narrated by a human but still use wikiHow pictures without any credit also be reported?

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Thanks for the help and support, all! Yea, @Zodiaw , it’s often good to report those too and we can have a look. Parody or humor type videos aren’t generally a problem (even good for a giggle sometimes!) but other types can be - ie copycat type videos, not commentary type ones. Doesn’t hurt to report if you’re not sure, and we can have a look and weed them out. Thanks!!

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I’d like to add in. Although most of the time scraper videos are robotic voices this doesn’t mean that if it’s a robot voice it is a scraper. We should still remove it from wH as we don’t like robot voices on videos but no need to report it if it’s not copying any content. Also, a scraper can be a humam voice. Just in my experience it’s robot 9/10.

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Hey guys! I have a question… a YouTuber who’s videos I like (Amelia Gething, she does comedy) post’s videos called “How To Adult” or “How To Have Fun” and stuff like that. Basically what she does is she goes on WikiHow and finds articles on what she wants to do, and then follows some of the steps in funny little skits. They aren’t meant to be taken seriously, but does it still count or does it not?

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That’s likely to be fair use. What Is Fair Use? - Copyright Overview by Rich Stim - Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center

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@Batreeq

Ok thank you!

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I remember finding one on the topic of  How to Access the wikiHow Community Dashboard , but I believed that the wikiHow logo included in the video was sufficient attribution. Regardless, I’m curious - has that video been removed?

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@Batreeq I don’t remember which video that was but if you see it again let us know through the form! Including the logo isn’t sufficient here because YouTube is a commercial site so you’d want to report any videos along these lines for us to take a look, even if there’s a logo or attribution (in some cases, use of a logo can actually be a trademark violation too, so we’d need to follow up on that as well, potentially). Cheers for keeping an eye out!

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Man, I really don’t like it whenever a YouTube video has an autonomous voice instead of a human voice.  At least use text boxes! XD

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This is a scraper:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=9&v=1zVp3UmEyQ8 It’s not like the common ones I see but it’s still one. Note how it basically just copy and pastes the wikiarticle into YouTube format. Sometimes there will be a robot voice reading it. And sometimes they’ll take the images too. 

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I’ll try my best to keep a lookout!

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I think one approach we can make is this:

  1. Get a random wikiHow article.
  2. Search it up on YouTube.
  3. Sort the videos by newest.  The sorting by default is by most popular, which would have better quality.  Newer ones are not always of high quality, so sort by that instead.  Plus, the video would be closer to the newest revision.
  4. Remember some of the text from the wikiHow article.  Just the first step could be enough.
  5. When the first step is the same, analyze both the article and video carefully.
  6. If the video is a scraper, post it in the form.

*Admin edit: please submit any potential violations in the form, not on this thread:slight_smile:

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What do we do if we find someone copying wikiHows work?

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@Thehelper101 Maybe this could work but it would take a long time. We have hundreds of thousands of articles so searching one by one would take a long time. The video adder on wikiHow catches a lot of them and is a bit more efficient. 

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Oh, I think that could also work.

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@Thehelper101 That would be a great idea, but it would take tons of members to do it quickly.