In a few hours, it will be January 15th, 2021; wikiHow’s Sweet 16th birthday! We’re growing up so fast! wikiHow is now old enough to drive, and we’re taking the wheel and rolling with it. Today, we’re in a great position to take a look back and celebrate what we’ve accomplished together so far.
As a community, we’ve created over 228,000 articles, made over 36.3 million edits, and answered over 659,000 questions. Astoundingly, we’ve had over 2.4 million members register on wikiHow over the last 16 years! Whether you’ve been around for years or are new to wikiHow, you have all helped wikiHow become a go-to source for trusted information. Many of you have spent countless hours answering reader questions and creating new articles to help anyone learn how to do anything. Millions of wikiGnome edits and small tweaks have all added up to help grow wikiHow into what it is today.
Throughout the last year, we’ve had a number of happenings to reflect on. Some of the bigger changes for wikiHow as a whole came with the update to a responsive design, and moving the forums to this wonderful new platform as a well-deserved upgrade not only for security, but also for design and functionality. We also added a new international site with the launch of Farsi, building our reach to even more of the world with 19 different languages.
COVID-19 proved to be an issue that impacted every single one of us, but together we continued to find ways to help others learn and find information. We worked in collaboration with the United Nations and World Health Organization to create and share trustworthy content, and wikiHow was named as a tech company
addressing misinformation. We wrote over 160 articles on COVID-19 and coronavirus-related topics, that have helped over a million people across the world. Mother Jones
also called us a hero of the pandemic, highlighting the importance and impact of our shared mission. We also collaborated with Vote.org
to help educate people with topics like How to Vote in a Primary Election
and How to Register to Vote Online
.
2020 was a year of continued innovation, and in December the first beta test of wikiHow Pro was launched, offering PDF downloads to readers. Alongside this, there were a number of experiments with article formats - list formats, interviews, medical formats - Q&A, interactive elements, a range of new courses and more. It will be exciting to see where this all leads.
The community is the heart of wikiHow, and you are a huge reason that we made it to our Sweet 16th. We’re grateful that you choose to share your time, your know-how, your ideas and your passion with wikiHow and our readers. Billions of people’s lives have been improved in ways large and small as a result of our collective efforts. Working together, I’m sure we’ll help billions more people as we pursue wikiHow’s mission in the next 16 years.
