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I’m new here, so I’m ignorant of whether some of this might already be hashed out thoroughly. I want to first say that I’m full of admiration for the enormous undertaking you folks have committed to, and I hope you don’t abandon it. (1) Has thought been given to legal issues? Do we need a disclaimer somewhere? (I should read all the nooks and crannies of the home page a little more closely!) (2) Some articles are obviously entirely subjective in content, and the subject-matter makes that necessary. Is there an automatic way to link to complementary or opposing views in other articles, or a way of combining complementary articles? (3) There are many sorts of users of this service out there. Some will be careful about following instructions closely, some will be all about taking short-cuts. Is there some “cultural” ways (meaning ways that users of wikiHow have settled on implicitly) of making sure that the reader is aware that a particular article will only work if every step is followed in detail, while other articles are most certainly open to short-cutting? (4) This is a minor issue: I come across lots of articles having to do with online games, including MMOG’s, in which often whether a particular ploy is allowed or discouraged is entirely a matter of the culture of that particular game, and not at all an ethical issue (e.g. reverse-engineering the code is encouraged). On the other hand, there are lots of articles that approach the limits of what is commonly considered decent and reasonable. Another kind of article is of the variety: “How to get a girl if your parents don’t want you to,” or “How to make your former boyfriend feel like a dickhead.” What does one do if one is called upon to patrol this sort of thing, where a mechanical issue such as a spelling or grammar edit is possible, but the article as a whole might not come up to (what I see as) wikiHow standards? Is there a checklist that a patrolman can refer to: e.g. “A: check to see if you can support the article as a whole, before you go on to fixing spelling. B: check to see …” etc. (5) What about carefully dating technology articles? For instance I recently wrote an article about connecting a PC to a (local) printer, which I expect to have a lifetime (the article, not the printer) of 3 years at the very most. It would be refreshing if it was possible to acknowledge, right in the article, just how long it should be expected to be helpful, e.g. 3 years from 2013, and an automatic alarm that reminds us to label the article “outdated” in early 2015. Finally, I saw a forum post deploring Spam in an article. I wonder whether some reasonable rules can be established about how and when to send a user to a particular service on the web (e.g. how to get your exact ring size) when it is the most reasonable thing to do? The same goes for commercial tools, e.g. Nero, or Adobe Flash.

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Hi Arch, It’s great to see someone new asking all the right questions! Welcome aboard! I’ve attempted to link you out to articles which will answer and/or expand upon your questions. (and feel free to ping my talk page with any other questions? I’ll be happy to help you find answers!) 1 - Yep! got that. http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Terms-of-Use 2 - Yep! Here’s how to do that. http://www.wikihow.com/Weave-the-Web-of-Links-on-wikiHow 3 - If you know something helpful?, feel free to add the alternate method to the article, or even write a whole new article about the second method of making/doing stuff! That’s great too! 4 - Pretty much, if you’re trying to help? your efforts cannot go far wrong. Here are a couple of good articles outlining how to edit on wikiHow. http://www.wikihow.com/Copyedit-a-wikiHow-Article and http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Good-wikiHow-Editor 5 - We have tags for articles of this sort… the only issue is getting someone to go around placing them when needed. (Wanna volunteer for this? Just asking!) http://www.wikihow.com/Category:Historical-Articles Part of the fun of editing at wikiHow is the fact that we’re each part of a huge crowdsourced project. We’re all volunteering our time, expertise and knowledge base to help other people. I’m incredibly pleased to see another like minded person join up. Again, Welcome!

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Hey there! First of all, welcome to wikiHow. I’ve got a bit of input that might help you out. You’ve got some very good questions, some of which I wondered at first, too. I guess starting at the beginning is as good a place as any, so so I’ll jump right in. Thought has been given to legal issues. There are so many ideals that you could wonder the legal issues about, however, that I’m not sure exactly what sort of legal issue you would be addressing. If you specify I might be able to give a better answer. Eh, do you mean if someone were to look at an article about how to be a good christian or any other religion but they weren’t religious, therefore they disagreed with the article? Well, we assume that people don’t look at specific articles that they would disagree with. I mean, usually on articles with subjective content we try to look at something official that goes with the content. I’m not exactly sure how to explain it; I’m sure some people will come by and clean up this part for me so it’s easier to understand. Ooh, I like this point. Unless doing a step wrong can result in something dangerous, it’s up to the reader to do the work correctly as I understand. If they do steps wrong and complain to their friends about how wikiHow didn’t help them whatsoever, that’s a shame but theres nothing we can do. There’s going to be gossip on any site. Now, on some steps you’ll see a little warning that says the dangers and cautionary tips if something is completed incorrectly. The authors can’t sit over the reader’s shoulder and nag their ear every time they do something not by the site so to some extent it has to be up to the reader to do things logically. I’m a bit lost on your fourth point so I’m going to skip it. We have a template for dated articles if the technology is completely irrelevant to everyday life however it’s rarely used and mostly used on internal, wikiHow articles. If there’s something that needs to be updated hopefully someone will come across it and update it. I will say that there is no way for any bot to mark things as dated because that’s just…Impossible. Things can be marked for needing editing however I think I agree that it might be cool if there was another way for things to be marked as DATED rather than just in need of editing. We have some guidelines on that; It’s been thought about for a while on this site and I might go dig for the in-print guidelines a bit later. You may have seen another forum thread about how some everyday words like ‘band aid’ are actually brand names and potentially violate our policies however using any other wording in place of band aid wouldn’t be recognized. For the most part, though, our spam policies are pretty shiny clean. Welp, I answered those to the best of my ability and understanding. If anyone disagrees with me, by all means, I’d like to know.:slight_smile:And thanks for looking for these sketchy points that you thought might need help c: It’s great to see people looking out for wikiHow.

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Well at least someone is really interested