I welcome the opportunity to talk at the meetup with all of the haus-volunteer team, but particularly with Jack, Jeff, Anna, and you, Krystle. I hope that the discussions are entered with the spirit of collaboration, whereby all participants are keen to identify the best elements from the mix of ideas and to integrate them into the fabric of wikiHow. I believe, though, that these meetup discussions should be in parallel with and an adjunct to open discussions in the public forums about the direction that wikiHow has taken/is taking. I am relatively new on the site and have only an inkling of the formative period of wikiHow , the period when policy and protocol were hammered out using the well-considered best judgement of a band of insightful, savvy individuals. What came out of that early collaboration is amazing: Essays, mission statement, hybrid organization, deletion policy, and ways of handling content were all arrived at with heavy input from the volunteer contingent. One of the factors which drew me to the site was wikiHow’s goal to become the world’s greatest enabler of humankind; a database which helps individuals everywhere do almost anything, when, before, they could not (or felt they could not). I ascribe to that goal and I believe that the policies put in place then and the methods that were developed for handling the spectrum of content submissions were spot on. I particularly liked the concept of accepting low quality content, then incrementally improving it over time until, one day, it might stand as the finest instruction set on the topic. Other wikiHow processes that resonated: dredging the depths and the way articles continually cycled through RCP, gradually being refined. Through the years, there were many individuals who arrived at well-considered systems of dealing with the articles they encountered in the various settings. Through repetition and thousands of hours, these caring minds categorized, tagged, groomed, and dispatched the articles with clocklike efficiency, so much so that both the regulars and the newcomers emulated these finely-tuned methods. In my time, TTrimm, BR, Isorhythmic, and Maluniu were the dynamos that energized the system. Like any corporate culture, the wikihaus culture evolved in increments to the current state in which the the haus:volunteer relationship is heavily weighted toward the haus. In times past, the community was made aware of the changes being considered by the haus and were actively invited to comment and to suggest alternatives and pitch them to others in the haus-volunteer community. Today, changes are contemplated in the haus, initiated in the haus, analyzed in the haus, and implemented primarily in the haus, then announced or rolled out to the volunteer community. Now, it seems that we volunteers are driving bumper cars with steering wheels that have been disconnected and do exactly nothing as the cars track along the path set by haus designs. We steer and steer, but soon come to realize that we are doing nothing; our actions have no effect. Along the evolutionary path, members of the volunteer community and the haus have developed ways of handling situations with efficacy. And, naturally, elements of those “expeditious ways” were copied and, thus, propagated throughout the community. So, today, there are far too many instances where individuals act efficaciously and do not truly value the thoughts, mindsets, and motivations of those suggesting change or submitting content. Rather, the trend is to deal with “new stuff” expeditiously. In any group or community, this penchant may well be inevitable, but in the wikiHow volunteer community, this has not actually settled in too strongly, maybe because other volunteers see the pattern and act to moderate it. (One exception is the blanket use of the nfd|acc which has recently been used in ways that are outside of its original intended use. I, for one, hope this extended use of nfd|acc diminishes dramatically.) I see many examples of staff deflecting legitimate concerns or taking no corrective action. Thus, many egregious and even dangerous situations remain months after volunteers who were powerless to make the needed changes took the time to bring these situations to the attention of the haus. There is only so much that a conscientious volunteer can (or will) do when it seems that she or he is beating her or his head on a wall at every turn. This is, perhaps, why Bob and Jeff are getting so frustrated. And the only way to correct the situation is to acknowledge the validity of their perceptions and the critical need for corrective action in the near term. That, coupled with direct feedback showing the corrective steps that were implemented (and asking if refinement is needed), would probably help heal wikiHow and go a long way towards healing the relationship with these tremendous contributors. What is most concerning, though, is what I perceive as a change in wikiHow’s raison d’être (reason to be)—from the driving force of wikiHow being that of empowering the whole of humankind to that of filling the wikiHow coffers with cash (through increased reads). There are many facets of this change, but all center on prettying up the articles and imbibing the articles with a mindless, pedestrian spirit centered on the American-scientific view and book-learning. What is falling by the wayside is the deep knowledge of experience and of ancient ways (which were found by much trial and error, tested by the years, and then passed to others apprentice-style). There were good reasons why the framers of the wikiHow platform made it so that every change or content creation was reviewed. There were good reasons why each new title was screened for being a duplicate and why all pertinent information was gathered under one title that was the most easily searched. These were the pylons around which all articles had to go before being seen by the masses. Now the review and screening process has been circumvented—not for the volunteers in the community, but for the paid contributors only. I liken this situation to the pursuit of happiness. When happiness is pursued directly, it vanishes into thin air. Happiness arrives out of the ether; only when unsought. It just is. The difference between the pursuit happiness and the pursuit of money is the pursuit of money is a seeking of a man-created entity. Money can be pursued successfully by man, but what disappears in that pursuit is all of the wonderful, natural qualities and wisdom inherent in natural, unsullied systems. It seems to me that human pride when thinking that man, science, and book-learning knows all has caused true knowledge and deep knowing to disappear, vanishing into thin air. The reality is that mankind knows very little, yet thinks he knows very much. We have not taken the teeniest bit of the first hint of taking the first baby step toward being able to create a seed, a viable unit marvelously small, yet containing the information-spirit blend which allows a mature plant (in connection with all nature’s parts) which, in turn, enables more of its kind to continue through time. Time and again, science proposes the solutions, but then has to back down from those solutions and acknowledge their lacking as well as the deeper knowing built into nature’s way. The reality is that science and book-knowledge is only good at manipulating the things of man, the world of man. Just one small illustration: Proud man used to think that he knew how matter worked. Now we find that when we delve into the smallness of atom constitution, we find nothing is there, only energy and potential. We now hypothesize dark matter and dark energy to make things work out the way we know they do. So that leaves only 4% of all that is that we know anything about. And man acknowledges that, of the 4%— the billions of stars in the Milky Way amid millions of billions of galaxies— we know so very little, even about what we can directly touch and see. It seems to me that the evolution of wikiHow has turned the corner and is now proceeding down a path of self-deception, one which does not serve the original purpose of empowering mankind to grow, flourish, and come to true knowledge. I hypothesize that the reason Jeff and Bob cry so loudly is because they do so as if for a child of theirs; one with great potential, one with whom they have shared much time, great wisdom, and more than a little hope, but a child who has squandered all the great potential within. I hypothesize that the cries reflect great disappointment that the vast potential has been squandered and not a little anguish, too. The good news is that the potential of wikiHow still exists and can be easily tapped. wikiHow resources are vast, only waiting to be tapped and activated in an intelligent way. For example, the engineers could focus on creating tools for sharing tools (between volunteers). The engineers could focus on keeping appropriate tools within hand-reach of each volunteer (based on the individual’s facility with wikicode and learning style(s)). Together, these initiatives would empower the volunteer base to be more productive, perhaps exponentially so. The engineers could focus on creating layers within articles, whereby each reader could select the knowledge-view he wanted or could flip through them—book-learning-scientific, master-craftsman, ancient-culture, ayurvedic, … Thus, the articles could be all-inclusive. Images could be tailored to the article instead of being universally hand-drawn or cartoonish. The engineers could work out ways to use parts and methods in combination and not make them mutually exclusive. … I apologize for the tl;dr character of this post. I guess the Serendipic verbosity got activated, but,… I strongly feel that the discussion needs to continue.
