It’s January 15th, 2018 - wikiHow’s 13th birthday. 13 years ago, wikiHow took the first steps toward accomplishing our crazy, audacious mission of helping everyone in the world learn anything. The number 13 is often one that many people consider unlucky – but as I reflect on this wikiHow anniversary, I’m reminded more than anything about the good fortune wikiHow has enjoyed over the years.
This good fortune starts with the amazing people who have become a part of our mission. From wikiHow’s earliest days, those who have joined our community are some of the kindest, brightest, and most giving people you’ll find anywhere. Early community members set the tone for those who found wikiHow in the years to come. Impressively, many wikiHow community members from the early days are still active contributors to wikiHow.
A large number of the people at our meetup in St. Louis have been a part of the wikiHow community for 7, 8, 9, 10 years - or more. We’re fortunate to have the wiki wisdom and experience that they contribute. Several of the others who attended the meetup might have been active on wikiHow for a year or two. We’re fortunate to continue to attract great new people into the wikiHow community - their energy and enthusiasm helps keep the wikiHow community a thriving, dynamic place.
Of course, good fortune isn’t simply something that just happens. The good things that have happened to wikiHow are things that we have all created in collaboration together. Working together, our efforts keep moving wikiHow closer to achieving our ambitious goals. In this last year, we’ve achieved many remarkable things:
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Dedicated and diligent NABers and patrollers have kept recent changes and the NAB queue showing sunny skies all year. Not long ago, we often had RC backlogs of well over 1,000 edits and a NAB queue of over 10,000 articles. This is an amazing achievement. We’ve done an impressive job of keeping our articles free from vandalism and spam, and in moving new articles forward.
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The merge project was a smashing success, processing nearly 4500 merge tags, thanks to a dedicated team of community members.
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Since the beginning of 2017, we’ve answered over 200,000 reader questions! This is just over 600 questions per day. We rolled out “Top Answerers” to identify questions that are answered by community members with topic expertise.
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Experts and community tech testers verified over 10,000 articles this year. wikiHow now has nearly 25,000 articles that have been tested or reviewed by experts.
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The wikiHaus has continued to experiment with innovative new ways to help readers - “In a Hurry” videos and summaries at the top of articles, a popular and highly rated skill for Alexa
, an app for Google Home assistant
, new illustration and animation styles, and more.
This last year also marked an important transition inside the wikiHaus. After 13 years as Founder and CEO of wikiHow, I decided to promote Elizabeth Douglas to the CEO role. Elizabeth has led the day-to-day operations at wikiHow for over 8 years, first as COO, then as President and COO. It now makes sense for her to become CEO too. Elizabeth is as passionate about our mission as I am. This transition is a recognition of changes in our roles that have been happening over a long time. Elizabeth is an amazing leader of our team, and she has my complete confidence. I won’t be going anywhere, either! I continue to serve wikiHow as Founder and Chairman of wikiHow. I still wake up everyday thinking about ways to help people learn through wikiHow and I still work in the wikiHaus like I always have.
In addition to the accomplishments I wrote about above, we’ve also learned more and more about what our readers think about our articles this year. The tech feedback tool is helping us to know which articles need fixing the most. And reader testimonials let us know when we succeed in helping people. Over 250,000 readers have shared with us their stories of how wikiHow helped them. It’s so inspiring to me to read these. Eric collected some great ones here:
forums.wikihow.com/discussion/24976/kudos-to-everyone#latest
Reading these is such a great reminder as to why we wikiHow. We have accomplished so much in our 13 years together – and I’m looking forward to what we’ll accomplish together in 2018. Please join me in welcoming wikiHow a 13th birthday! What are some things you hope we can do in wikiHow’s 14th year?
