I no longer recognize the wikiHow I once loved.
I remember my first time I came across this site. Way back when, half a decade ago, my hands writing up an article I thought would never be published. Writing as a passion project, a what if, a maybe that there will be a place where a snippet of my knowledge – anyone’s
– can be shared.
I remember the joy of what it felt like to see my doubts go unfounded, to see my article go live on this site. I remember what it was like to fall in love with this community, a group of people who dedicated their time together toward a shared pursuit, engaged in a united mission: to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything.
But remembering is all that’s left. Memory is the only place I can find and feel the wikiHow I once loved, no matter how hard I try each day to seek it once more.
Because, similar to the concerns my fellow editors have raised, I have felt a wave of disillusionment wash away the motivation for me to continue on wikiHow, regardless of how hard I try to grope for reasons. They are concerns that have been sitting in my head continuously, silent but constant, for years in my mind. With each passing day, as I find them more difficult to reconcile with wikiHow’s mission, I find myself more distant from the site I once thought stood for something greater.
I apologize for the length of my message and for my tone if strident in reading. But I hope you will bear with me. I hope you will understand that I love wikiHow, that I speak not from hatred but from a sadness and disappointment with a project that I once had found purpose and mission.
But to me, the future of the “wiki” in wikiHow seems undeniably clear: slowly but steadily, the community that once built this project from the ground up will disappear, and wikiHow will become the content farm we all once dreamed unimaginable.
Yes, I know change is not just inevitable but necessary. I know the staff, from quizzes to entertainment articles to commercial experts, are doing what is necessary to stay afloat. I know they are doing what is needed to stay relevant in our new age. I know there are company concerns far outside what us few volunteers can neither consider nor comprehend. But it appears that in the process of staying relevant, we forgot about what it is we stood for.
Because wikiHow, and I dare not speak for anyone but myself, is now no longer a company in support of a community; it is a community in support of a company, one that deviates further from its mission each passing day.
My concerns first began with wikiHow Pro. I remember the day it was announced, as I sat there behind my computer, editing away on some article time has long removed from memory. But time never once made me lose sight that my editing – our
editing – is for the betterment of someone else who needs it. So I felt rocks rain as I learned of the initial paywall. Where was the free and open website that was established upon our mission? How would those who wanted to learn the skills under paywall, but had not the surplus dollars to expend, learn on what was supposed to be a wiki for everyone?
On the forums that day, I read a message which Alex wrote – not me, but Alex known under Galactic Radiance – that encapsulated my concerns. He wrote, and I paraphrase loosely, how he feared wikiHow would morph into one of the many sites that started off open, but evolved into paywall-hidden or mission-devoid projects that are now relegated to the low-quality Internet. I casted his view aside then, but I fear now he may have been right. So much more of wikiHow is now focused on pure viewership-increasing motives. Articles of commercial products that would traditionally have been against guidelines are now promoted. Policies once hailed as gospel are now tossed out the window in the name of SEO or readership.
The homepage I have open right now, just as I am writing this, illustrates precisely what has happened. I’ll name just a few: “200 Adjectives to Describe a Person,” “What is the Rarest Zodiac Sign,” and so on. And today is a good day. As Iris put it, these articles are what I would expect to find on Buzzfeed or Yahoo. They are not what anyone would have expected to find on wikiHow just a few years ago. They are also not the articles of a project that each of us signed up to pour our time into.
For those who remember, I implore you to recall whether any of this would even have been thinkable just a few years ago. If this was our homepage then, what would we have said? What would we have done? I think the answer is as clear as it is painful. The article would have been deleted, and the explanation to the editor would have been ordinary then, but almost inconceivable now: because it doesn’t conform with our mission.
Perhaps this is all necessary. Perhaps these changes, in an age of technology that consumes all oxygen from sites that don’t change to what is the “meta” of the day, is necessary. And I don’t doubt for a single second that the staff do everything in their power for, out of good-faith commitments, to keep wikiHow relevant and afloat. That is, like our mission, equally necessary.
But it seems that the former task of keeping wikiHow afloat as a platform to serve high-quality content has superseded the importance of high-quality content altogether. For someone who has been here for over half a decade, it is truly heartbreaking. As I look for remaining reasons to continue contributing to this site, I find fewer and fewer within sight.
Remember: we are volunteers. We are people who write, edit, and contribute for this site because we believe in its mission. We are people who have devoted hundreds of hours of our time, for free, to a project devoted to helping others. We are not, however, mindless contributors for a company that puts profit over people this site was first meant to be for. It feels more like the latter now than ever before.
It seems increasingly so that I am but an unpaid employee in a community working for a staff that has long forgotten about us or why we first came. I once spent many hours a day volunteering because I felt like my work mattered; I now do so because a small part of me, a belief in this project instilled since the first edit I made, continues to maintain that I am not a stubborn stickler to a lost idea or gone community of exploited volunteers. But I am losing faith.
There is a quote on Eric’s user page (and please do not construe me to be speaking at all for him, for I understand we may all have very different viewpoints on this issue), a message left by one of thousands of editors who took a few seconds to leave their mark on this project.
It is a message that encapsulated why I continued to wish that either wikiHow – or perhaps my own view – would change to give me persisting reason to stay on this site. It goes like this:
“… I am very glad to be part of this moving train. It is a dynamic movement capable of changing millions of lives daily. It gives equal opportunities and potential for anyone to create tremendous impact in one way or the other, in the lives of those who are desperate and losing hope.”
I no longer know where we are on this moving train. As I look back at my countless hours spent on what I truly believed to be an incredible project, one in which I woke up early and eager each day to contribute, I am running out of reasons – despite how hard I continue in trying – to justify my love and dedication for this site.
Every bit of me wishes that I am wrong. But I fear that I am not.
