(I started to write this in response to this thread ( http://forums.wikihow.com/discussion/4447/how-do-we-get-people-on-school-break-to-become-better-wikihow-contributors/#Item_24
) but it started to diverge pretty far from the thread topic so I thought I’d post it on its own) ------- I’d bet that if you looked at our reader demographics, they’d skew a bit older than our editor demo. I think a key moving forward is going to be figuring out how to tap into this huge reader base that is familiar with the content of wikis, knowing wikiHow obviously and probably Wikipedia as well, but isn’t too “in the know” with regards to the editing of wikis. For example, we have approximately 1.4 MILLION fans on Facebook. That’s a lot of people! I think we should engage those Facebook fans more. Rather than just articles, I’d also sprinkle in things like “Have a skill you want to share with wikiHow? Here’s how to create a new wikiHow article!”, maybe community updates as well. An influx of new editors who have already demonstrated interest in wikiHow should help us in several ways. In the short term, we’ll have more hands on deck. These users will likely be older (or at least old enough to have a Facebook) and will balance our demographics out I’d think. More hands on deck means more people to complete long, arduous tasks that might take our current community years to complete (including revamping some “problem” categories). Additionally, these people, through their prior exposure to wikiHow articles, should be off to a better start than newbies who find the site through, say, a Google search. They’ll know the sort of writing that leads to a successful wikiHow article (having read Featureds from the Facebook feed). They may have clicked through related articles or weaved links in the process and seen some templates. They’re not coming in “blind”. In the long term, this should really help further our mission. We’ll have more articles written, more people to improve them, and more people to help improve our already existing articles as well. The community will be more vibrant. We can stick to our values as a site even as we grow and we can truly become the biggest little site on the internet.
We might benefit from disseminating some sort of “common wiki myths” document, to help address this and other reasons that people might not want to join the community. http://www.wikihow.com/User:Metsguy234/WikiMyths
I wrote that up as an early draft.
I think some of things that are scary about wikis to people actually are present on some other wikis (namely the Wikimedia entities) though. Wikipedia has a ton of policies, can be pretty harsh to new users, and has a hugely steep learning curve. I’ve been around wikiHow for 5 and a half years and I’m still scared to edit Wikipedia.
@Elocina
, speaking of Reddit, the wikiHow subreddit is dead: http://www.reddit.com/r/wikihow/
I think if we started promoting it and added a moderator who’s active on Reddit *cough* me *cough* it might stand a fighting chance.
I think the under 13 crowd seems a lot larger than it is because we’re not marketing as best as we can to adults, and people are just “organically” finding us, you could say. Less internet savvy adults may read an article that they find in a Google search, not be enthralled by the site, and leave. Teens are more likely to see that- omg I can edit this page to add a fact about this, and I can write a page about that, and wow look at the cool design this user has on their page- and sign up. I think our key, for now at least, is going to be to focus on older people (older as in, at least college-aged I’d say) who HAVE HEARD of our site already. That’s why I like the idea of starting with our many Facebook fans (around 1,400,000 to repeat the figure again). Twitter is nice but if you look just proportionally, we only have around 35,000 followers on there. The audience isn’t as large by a longshot.
This is actually a great idea. I can think of a few things off the top of my head. -Improves your writing skills. -Gets your writing “out there” on the Internet. -Strong sense of community. and so on
I think the blog could be workable but we’d have to a) market it right and b) give it some sort of interesting angle. People who are fans of wikiHow on Facebook won’t need to, say, see the featured articles of the day included in blog form, because they already have seen most of the FAs.
@Krystle
what do you think about all of this?
I agree and have been thinking about this for a long time. Everyone addresses the technological and cultural barriers, but another major barrier is time – or the perception that people do not have enough time. I’ve noticed that a lot of the major editing periods occur when people are on vacation. People who are busy or think that wiki editing is time consuming may not want to try to edit. It’s also harder to fit in wiki editing if you have a full-time job. I think one way to address this is to discuss the benefits of wiki editing. Back in 2009 at Recent Changes Camp, there was a really great conversation about wikis and the recession and part of what came out of it was a list of many of the benefits of wiki editing – particularly the skills you get to develop or improve. Another way to address the time issue is developing ways that people can contribute via mobile devices and I know that the wikiHaus is working on this. Another barrier is that people don’t know what they can contribute. Part of this is lack of “low-hanging fruit”. As wikiHow gets bigger it’s hard to think of topics to add. Most people seem to start contributing to wikiHow by adding an article. Another issue is retaining people. This is just as important as getting new people IMHO. I think we are getting a lot of new editors, it’s just that not all of them stay. I A lot of people who start editing and then get discouraged. Answering requests is an area where this happens a lot. The request tool often doesn’t weed out duplicate topics, so people will add a duplicate article, and get discouraged when that article gets nominated for deletion or merged.
I think this is a great idea and something that could be promoted on Facebook – even potentially go viral with the right amount of editing. I need to think of some myths. Speaking of Facebook, it may be a good place to mention mentoring/ways to get help. We have a whole page that lists people willing to mentor wikiHowians, but I don’t know how many users are aware that there are people who are willing to coach them. Mentioning this on Twitter and Facebook, maybe on a monthly basis, may help raise awareness. The new newsletter may also be a good place for this as well. Lastly, Facebook and Twitter might be good places to ask people if they have tried to edit or need help. Maybe there could be a tag for wikiHow related questions that active wikiHowians could follow so they could provide guidance.
Maniac
10
I like the idea of publishing and distributing “wiki myths” as, even today, a lot of people do not have a great perception of wikis. I think that it is probably better to generalize the answers/responses though…while it might be good advertisement for us to give responses that are specific to wikiHow, people may react better to a document that gives them reasons to try out wikis in general versus reasons to join and edit wikiHow. I dunno, I could be wrong…but I think that the first step in the wiki struggle, if you will, is to get people to understand wikis on a whole, and then once they have that down, figure out what type of wiki they would enjoy the best - an encyclopedia, a how-to manual, a dictionary, and so on. Of course, we would love if they liked the how-to style the best… wikiHow specific “myths” would be better for people who are familiar with the how-to article concept already, but not necessarily in a wiki format - basically, people who regularly contribute to the websites of our competitors. It’s more a matter of where to distribute the info… despite their size, Twitter and Facebook (and really every other social networking website) only go so far, even when you are reaching out to millions of people who are supposedly interested in wikiHow.
system
12
We’ll need to convince the reader / soon-to-be-editor that wikiHow is easier, friendlier, simpler… My only question would be: How do we encourage editing so as to attract the over 50 crowd without also encouraging the under 13 crowd?
I’m 15 years old right now. The age group which you are trying to prevent (around my age) usuallyclick on a link (or visit a new website) if it is something they are interested in. And what are teens mostly interested in? Tech-stuff, new OS upgrades, craft-things, new gadgets, any international news/ happenings, etc. You normally won’t find a teen on a social network visiting another wiki for recipes or something like that. We can keep this in mind and figure out how do we encourage editing so as to attract more adults and less children.
We should also debunk the myth that wikiHow has unnecessary and “common sense” topics that make the reader think “Why would I do that?” or “Why would you even need to learn
that? It’s just common sense!” There are a lot of external sources and articles that say this. wikiHow’s article on Wikipedia even has a Criticisms section that mentions this. And I think that hurts our readership numbers a bit.
system
15
@Guarang
Note I said “the under 13 crowd” … you clearly are older than that age bracket. My worry was that if we touted the ease and simplicity in an effort to entice and older, less tech savvy crowd, that we’d ALSO attract 10 year olds thinking they should start articles (with or without parental approval).
@Loiswade42
I saw that you were mentioning about the under 13 crowd, but since I’m not tooelder to them, I thought of posting my opinion! That’s it
And I agree to you about attracting 10 year olds.
I think it would be hard to come up with other places where we would get a big audience, unless someone from wikiHow could get a blogging gig with one of the big tech sites like Mashable (which we probably should tryh to do anyway since it’s good for publicity). I had thought of Pinterest, but it’s a highly visual medium and I don’t know if a wiki myth article would go viral there. Digg, StumbleUpon and Reddit (particularly the last two) may be better choices.
I would settle for the over 30 – or even post-college – crowd at this point.
I don’t think we are trying to prevent teenagers. For me it’s about getting more productive teen editors, since people who just come to wikiHow to kill time and don’t have any other interests/goals usually aren’t as likely to stick around and become “good contributors”. I would also like to incerase the number of older editors, including those who are closer to my age or the age when I started (25). In terms of the topics teens are interested in, I don’t think the items you listed are the main ones I find based on what I’ve seen on wikiHow over the years. The topics that attract the most teens relate to characters/celebs (the Clique and Pretty Little Liars (still) in particular), trends (scene, emo), popularity, and middle school dating/makeup (How to get a date in the __th grade). For tech, crafts, international news – I think those are areas where there are some really outstanding editors who stick to those “beats”. The character articles in particular are one area where I’ve gotten into some arguments with people in terms of format, because people just don’t agree with the policy or feel that their article shouldn’t be changed. Last year, one editor told me not to edit any of her articles after I changed her article about an Ant Farm character so it met the character guidelines. I don’t even know anything about Ant Farm and some stranger is trying to accuse me of all these things when I’m just trying to prevent her article from being deleted. I think new adult contributors who maybe aren’t familiar with how wikiHow works may be deterred by those kind of interactions.
^ Haha, we got the hint. =) Hey, remember the blog? If we started up the official blog, it could attract adult readers. How many socializing teens read blogs? Not many. It would probably be adults or really caring teens to read the blog like that. Like I said…It could attract high-quality editors. Just a thought. June Days
system
19
I love the wikimyths idea! Can we put it in the wikiHow namespace and start a separate forum thread inviting people to add to it? Once it fleshes out, it’s something we could put on our Facebook page
