What we’ve accomplished
wikiHow was started in 2005 by Jack Herrick, who invited readers to participate in building the world’s largest how-to manual by editing, organizing, and writing articles. As our library grew, so did the wikiHaus team, which focused on making wikiHow easier to find via search, easier to use, and easier to edit. wikiHow was an experimental project back then, and still is to this day. The world has changed a lot over the past 17 years, and wikiHow has always adapted.
For example, in 2011, our project faced a huge challenge. Google pushed something called the Panda Update, in an effort to make sure the highest quality content rose to the top. wikiHow and many other sites lost significant proportions of their readership overnight. However, the wikiHaus and volunteer community rallied to clean up low-quality articles, and worked to make all the articles on wikiHow as comprehensive and helpful as possible. The wikiHaus launched innovations like New Article Boost and started producing more content to add to our growing library. Since then, we have paid a lot more attention to SEO, because if no one is able to find wikiHow, then we can’t fulfill our mission of helping everyone learn how to do anything. We could’ve disappeared like many other websites affected by Panda did, but instead, we adapted, and a result, we continued growing.
To date, we’ve created over 236,000 articles and made over 37 million edits. We have an astounding 4,000 active people making contributions to wikiHow every month, with over 2.5 million all-time registered members.
To continue helping as many readers as possible, in 2021 we kept experimenting and innovating. The last year has brought expansion to our Pro membership, new article formats, newsletters, updates to alt domains, the wikiHow to Meme game, and so many tests and experiments that we could be here all day naming them! We’ve learned about reader intent, new ways to implement experiments, what design elements work best for readers, and more. Going forward, we will continue to find new ways to reach and teach people around the world.
Over the course of the last year, we have continued to partner with many amazing organizations and experts. We collaborated with the United Nations Verified initiative to create a free course on fighting misinformation online
, which is available in 6 languages and has been taken by almost 5,000 people in less than 2 months. We also hit 1,000 experts featured on our articles to help ensure our content is as accurate and trustworthy as possible.
We have accomplished this together, and every contribution has played a role in getting us to where we are today. Thank you for seeing that “edit” button and accepting the invitation to help grow this epic project.
The future of wikiHow in 2022 and beyond
The goal for the wikiHaus in 2022 is to focus on the areas where we can help people the most. For example, in the past year, we’ve learned that people around the world find wikiHow relationship advice very helpful, so we’re asking ourselves: What are innovative ways we can be even more helpful in this area? We are going to keep on focusing on research and data to identify more subject areas like these, where there are educational gaps that wikiHow can fill with high-quality, trustworthy content.
We will continue experimenting, as we always have, because the world continues to change quickly and we must keep changing with it. wikiHow has changed a lot from the early days, but our commitment to the mission has not. In earlier chapters of our story, this meant creating as many articles on as many topics as possible. In more recent chapters, it has meant emphasizing quality and expertise. Today, our biggest focus is to remain accessible through search, and that will bring new changes with it.
Through it all, we’ll do our best to keep you, our volunteer community, informed and involved. As 2022 unfolds, please assume good faith and remember that if we don’t communicate every detail, it’s not because we are trying to ignore you; it’s because we’re doing big things with a small group of people, and most importantly, because we’re laser focused on continuing to accomplish our mission.
We will make mistakes, and sometimes we will not be able to resolve issues immediately. There are some issues we won’t be able to resolve at all, as we were able to in the early days. If you look around, there are not many successful websites left that invite community volunteers to contribute to them, because doing so involves placing a lot of trust and patience in people. We ask that you place that same trust and patience in us.
To all of our wikiHowians, we are so grateful for the time, expertise, and passion you share with wikiHow and our readers. I’m so proud of what we have been able to do in 17 years, and I know there are more great things to come! So please join me in wishing wikiHow a Happy Birthday!
