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Lately WRM has been writing titles that are incredibly questionable. Some examples include:

  • Tell if a German Girl Likes You and Text a Columbian Girl , which is othering and stereotypes people based on their nationalities. This is especially concerning because some nationalities or ethnicities (e.g. Japanese and Korean) are already subject to fetishization, and women tend to get the brunt of it.
  • What is My Native American Spirit Animal? , which appropriates Indigenous cultures. Many Native American tribes have specifically asked non-Native people to not adopt this tradition.
  • Meet a Transgender Girl , which is incredibly othering and could legitimately endanger trans women; there are people who fetishize trans and nonbinary people, and those are the kinds of people who would most likely be looking this up.

Multiple people have voiced complaints about these, and I’ve emailed @JayneG and @Chris_H about three of them. But there’s been no openness or back-and-forth discussion about this; Tell if a German Girl Likes You was edited and re-promoted without a chance to talk about whether the changes actually resolved the problem, Text a Columbian Girl was written less than an hour before I made this post, and there’s been complete radio silence about the Native American and Transgender Girl articles – and perhaps most worryingly, why these articles continue to be publishedand whether there’s any plan to prevent them from getting through.

This could have serious ramificationsfor wikiHow, all of its editors, and marginalized groups who may not even use wikiHow. It can’t just be swept under the rug, and the lack of communication (and seeming lack of concern for volunteer input and the impact this could have on other people alike) is incredibly disturbing. So I’m posting this to open the door for discussion among community and staff alike, because we cannot keep glossing over this.

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It’s so frustrating? upsetting? idk to see these articles continue to be published. Several editors, myself included, have made clear that we take issue with these articles (or at least elements of them), only to then have these concerns at best paid only lip-service to or worst, thoroughly ignored.

I know that the Haus is interested in making wH the place that readers think of when they want relationship advice - but articles like this are only going to do the opposite. Articles based on stereotypes don’t help readers and almost certainly won’t engender support from the population they’re about.

I’m all for collaboration and working to find compromise, but that’s just not happening with these articles (and not for want of trying by several editors). As Alex has (as per the norm) expressed better than I could, this does have a tangible impact on editors and the volunteer community. I’m passionate about the wH mission and about the wiki way of doing things, and its genuinely disheartening and, honestly, alienating, to see that good-faith concerns are ignored.

This also kinda raises the issue of accountability. Obviously, the vast majority of edits, staff and community receive some degree of community review and scrutiny (NAB, RCP, etc.) - new articles by community authors are reviewed, staff and volunteer edits are reviewed; if, for example, an SE edit came through RCP that had an error, was inaccurate, etc., then it’s relatively easy to flag this up or take immediate steps to fix it, not so with WRM content. To have such minimal community scrutiny of WRM content before it goes live, especially in combination with the radio silence that post-hoc feedback receives, is certainly not a positive state of affairs.

I get that the Haus might be targeting popular search terms and such, and I get that search rankings and site visibility is an important thing for wH as a business to pursue, but it’s also important to remember that wH has a moral responsibility for what it puts out. To contribute to and normalise the appropriation of indigenous practices is not morally right. To push cultural stereotypes is not morally right. To potentially endanger an already vulnerable community is not morally right.

I’ve not got any concrete solutions or suggestions, but I feel that having far greater community input into reviewing the content WRM produces, both before and after the article goes live would be a positive step.

I could go on at length about this and about other community-related issues, but this is turning into a text wall already.

I’ll end off by saying that I really hope we can reach a positive solution, and I’m happy to be involved in getting to that point either on the Forums or via more direct conversations.

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WRM published What is the Taurus Spirit Animal just ten minutes ago. I have no words.

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Honestly, at this point, I’m not sure what to say. I live by the wiki “assume good faith” policy, but this content has really been drawing the line at what can be dismissed as “just another bump in the road”.

The wiki community has always drawn me in for being inclusive—to add a personal note, I never would’ve felt safe coming out as non-binary if it weren’t for our site, and I doubt I’m alone in this—so it sent shivers down my spine to see these articles being written, especially from a staff account. Knowing the lovingness of our community, volunteers and staff alike, it pains me to see this sort of content that contradicts our beliefs and values. It is not okay to promote content that stereotypes, appropriates, or could flat-out put already degraded minorities in danger.

I posted on the discussion pages of a few of these articles, and while revisions have been made to some of them, others have been blatantly overlooked, whether intentional or not. I appreciate that action was taken to work on some of these, but even then, there was no checking in with those bringing up the red flags before the articles were put back live as if there were no issues to begin with. We need to work together, now more than ever, to make sure the site is safe, inclusive, welcoming, and reliable.

wikiHow will always have a place in my heart, and I care very deeply about everyone who’s involved in this project. As such, it would be great to hear from the staff side and collaborate on a solution that would both address community concerns and leave no one out. After all, coming together is what has always made wikiHow, well, wikiHow.

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I appreciate the input and feedback here. Alex reached out to us via email with concerns about these articles recently. I know his emails and the forum posts here are coming from a good place, with the goal of doing what’s best for wikiHow and our readers.

I hope that everyone reading this knows that’s what our content team is trying to do as well. Assuming good faith is foundational to what wikiHow is about.

As Jayne has shared, we’re doing a lot of experimentation in that area right now, and are looking for topics that we can do well and find readers. As with all experiments, not everything we’ll try will work, and we’ll use what we learn to do better in the future.

Regarding GB742’s suggestion: for a variety of reasons, it doesn’t work for us to try to get topics reviewed by the community before we publish them. We are always happy to accept feedback and discuss articles that have been written.

Please know that even if we aren’t able to reply to emails or take action right away, it doesn’t mean we aren’t considering your feedback. I am reviewing these and similar articles with the content team, and will follow up with everyone here.

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Chris, I hear you, and I know everyone on staff wants wikiHow to do the best it can for readers. The problem is that the readers wikiHow would find with these kinds of topics are not the type of people we want to attract. If we cater to readers who are looking up vaguely racist, blatantly fetishistic, culturally insensitive, etc. queries, we’re sending a message to the “other side” of that, that they are not safe or respected on wikiHow. That’s something that will be felt both by readers and editors.

Part of why I’m so upset about this is because both “Tell if a German Girl Likes You” and “Meet a Transgender Girl” are things that struck me personally. I’m German-American, my mother is German, and when I told my parents about the title alone they both looked absolutely disgusted. And as a trans person (on the other side of the binary, but still), something like “Meet a Transgender Girl” made me feel threatened, and I ended up physically sick from seeing it. I’ve been subject to harassment myself; I’ll spare the gory details but if I’m being truthful, I’ve actually been subject to worse. And the message that these articles are sending is that the effect this is having on me, and other people like me, does not matter.

I’m going to paraphrase what I said on the Discussion page of Meet a Transgender Girl: It’s not okay to put readership numbers over a group’s – particularly a marginalized group’s – safety.That’s what’s happening here. That’s why I brought this to the forums instead of waiting for a reply, after the Columbian girl article was published.

What I don’t understand, at the end of the day, is why these titles, content experiments, whatever they are – were not immediately paused when I emailed the first time. If these kind of things are being rolled out, it would be more logical to pause as soon as multiple people raised concerns and reassess the strategy then . These titles have continued being published even when they’re on things that the culture or community in question has asked people not to do – like with the latest “Taurus spirit animal” article (which isn’t even how spirit animals work). Nor have we gotten any further or public communication on what’s happening with these. And none of that is okay.

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I completely agree with all that’s been said so far. And while I understand that wikiHow is trying to find topics that will reach readers, and that wikiHow is a business, I don’t think any topic that promotes a tradition that many Native American tribes have asked non-Native people not to adopt, stereotypes people based on their nationality, and potentially causes a community that is already vulnerable to be put in danger is right for wikiHow. wikiHow should be a safe, inclusive place for everyone .
Thank you, Alex, for creating this discussion. I sincerely hope that staff and volunteers can collaborate and reach a positive solution.

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Hey Yall,I completely agree with the points made by some of my fellow wikiHowians above. As many of you have likely noticed, my activity has been relatively low as of recent. But after reading and getting as much context as possible about these titles here’s my two cents. Many of these articles enforce stereotypes as facts, especially the cultural ones. To outline the LGBT+ articles I feel that specifically the “How to Meet a Transgender Girl” article could lead to someone being harmed physically or sexually. I’m worried that these articles being written by WRM could lead to reprimands on the site as a whole in the long run. Like I said at the start I haven’t been the most active, but I don’t feel this is right so I had to give my 2 cents.

Thank you Alex for starting this dialogue.

Sincerely,EJ

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Experimenting is necessary, certainly, and I fully support the Haus in devising new formats and means of distributing information to further the pursuit of wH’s mission. I also would generally laud the productivity of the content team and certainly see their efforts as coming from a place of genuine good faith. But experimentation, particularly without prior consultation with/notification of the community, doesn’t excuse or justify writing objectionable content (and then continuing to publish it once its objectionability has been repeatedly flagged).

I’m sure it’s not in any way the intention, in fact I’m confident it’s the opposite, but the material impact of not rapidly and visibly responding to or actioning feedback, particularly of this nature, is to make volunteer editors feel disconnected and alienated from wikiHow.

A perhaps salient quote (only somewhat stealing your thing EJ…)“One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” - Paulo Friere

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This. This. THIS.I’ve been losing the will to contribute because I feel like nothing I say has been making any difference anymore. I feel like staff has been swat-waving me away repeatedly when I voice concerns, like I’m just some kind of annoying bug near their ears. I feel like I’m outright getting the silent treatment at points when I say something and then it goes unaddressed for the better part of a day, without even some kind of “let me get back to you on that” response (and this is particularly prominent because sometimes the responses sound very tense compared to the same person’s responses to other people). I feel like the LGBT+ community, a community I’m part of, has been exploited and kicked in the face for the sake of reader numbers. I feel so hurt and angry and devastated and wounded and used because I’ve put my heart and soul into this project for six years and now we’re getting content like this, in addition to content that lacks the care, sensitivity, and direct experience needed for it to be helpful, and I’m feeling progressively more and more beaten down because I don’t have the time to rewrite all of these people’s content for them (and in the case of some of these articles, like the spirit animal articles, the only way to fix the problem is to delete – or at least demote – the entire page). I feel like I’ve lost my voice here and that is so incredibly painful when wikiHow was what helped me learn to use my voice in the first place.

i’ll go finish my breakdown somewhere else now, i’m sorry

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I 100% agree with Alex. The article “How to: Meet a Transgender Girl” has had the most impact on me, and personally, it’s extremely unsettling (as a transgender boy). It’s not something you see every day, but there are chasers and people who look for this stuff. What makes it worse, these articles are moving through the quality review process at a rapid speed. When I googled “how to meet a transgender girl,” this wikiHow article came up as one of the top results—it was quite disturbing. These articles horrify me and make me fearful of similar articles in the future. This is a serious situation that could have complications for wikiHow.

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Thank you – I knew there was something else that I was missing! I hadn’t looked up any of these specific titles on Google, but I’ve done it with other articles in the past and they’re almost always indexed within 24 hours, sometimes even faster. Meet a Transgender Girl is barely a day old itself. The speed at which these articles are indexed by search engines and the fact that we’ve continued to get similar new titles after multiple people had already raised concerns is incredibly worrying.

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When I see content like this combined with staff disregarding community concerns, it just makes me wonder what we’re doing here and if it’s even worth it anymore. Seeing my fellow editors express genuine feelings of hurt, disapproval, and frustration and being unable to get answers just sucks.

Let’s be real, things have changed. And the way things are going, it just makes me want to walk away and stop participating in this project. I think it’s a pretty powerful impact when an volunteer editor with a decade worth of experience says they no longer want to contribute as a result of all this. I’m sorry Chris H and others on the staff, but “experimentation” doesn’t mean a thing anymore. The truth is - wikiHow doesn’t feel like a wiki anymore.:slightly_frowning_face:

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Well, I agree. I’d hate to say something like this but, to be honest, it feels like “staff can do it all”. Then why a wiki?

WRM articles almost always have the “expert co-authored” stamp – WRM articles almost always get a custom title, even when they aren’t needed, when community articles are sometimes not given custom titles because “they’re doing good anyways” – WRM articles are a lot quicker to get wikiVisual images (typically wikiVisual takes no longer than 4 weeks to add images to WRM articles, from what I’ve noticed, though I may be wrong) when community articles take at least six to eight weeks, it’s clear that WRM articles are the “first preference” – WRM articles usually stay “staffinuse” until they get images and are “all done”, which means we, community members, can’t add images, even when we want to – the Main Page is, a lot of times, almost flooded WRM articles, leaving little place for community articles – WRM articles are so often featured, even when far better community articles aren’t – WRM articles even pop up on searches far quicker than community articles do after being promoted.

Okay, I’m going too far, but this is pretty frustrating. Not that I mean I don’t like wikiHow anymore, I still do love to help around wikiHow, and since I’m rather new, I don’t know what it was like when we, the community would do most of the job. I mean we need staff’s help, we really do. But it’s getting too much now.

Now if you don’t mind me mentioning something else, too – the fact is, WRM’s been creating duplicates, too. We already had “How to Download and Install Brave Browser” (which I created), and after a few weeks , WRM created How to Install Brave . This is something I (and probably everyone here) by no means expect. This was completely out of what I expect, and very most annoyed me. Even though we should’ve merged the newer one to the existing one, that isn’t what happened, just because it was a WRM article. What happened instead was I ended my retitled mine, so it wasn’t interchangeable so mine’s now Install Brave on a Mobile Device . But why did I have to compromise when it was WRM’s fault?

Experiments are good, I personally like experiments myself. But our experiments are going too far now. How much do we experiment – how much do we experiment? It seems to go on and on. Experiments need to stay under a limit. It’s to common to see non-how-to titles these days. And something like “ Creative Ways to Wish Someone Happy Birthday on Facebook ” simply looks weird when we could easily have a more how-to title like “How to Wish Someone Happy Birthday on Facebook”.

Well, WRM articles don’t technically go through Quality Review. Even when one’s created seconds ago, it won’t have the orange bar. So as soon as a WRM article is published, it can be viewed by logged-out readers (though it does take some time to appear on searches, it can still be viewed via the link).

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@Buterflie The thing that’s been bothering me with WRM lately (that I didn’t initially bring up because my main concern was the controversial titles) is that they’ve essentially co-opted topics they clearly don’t have direct experience with, and are subsequently writing things that are just not helpful – and these are getting autopromoted, receiving “staff author” stamps, and don’t get feedback from people who seem to have experience on the topic. I’ve seen several recent WRM articles on LGBT+ identity that were clearly written by cis and/or straight people, because it didn’t address anything that an actual queer person might be up against. There was one article on knowing whether you should transition that’s best summarized as “if you have gender dysphoria, you should transition” with no regard for personal safety, the reader’s financial situation, the amount of transition they want to pursue, and so forth. And then there was another article on coming out that put so much emphasis on how coming out is a great thing and you’ll feel so much better if you do it, and “most parents will accept you” or at least eventually come around… when that wasn’t even in the source used, and there was no acknowledgement of the fact that for some people, coming out can still legitimately endanger their life. (It was not that long ago that I rescued a friend after he was outed to his abusive parents, and he was so incredibly lucky because had the timing been different, he could have either ended up on the streets or in conversion therapy.)

… As painful as it is, and as much as I love everyone on staff, I have to echo Matt’s comment.

Things have changed a lot. I know that the web landscape changes rapidly and we have to change rapidly with it, and I know that figuring out how readers react to those changes can take months or years. At the same time, I’ve been feeling like I have less and less value here, especially since I’ve started school and just haven’t had time for much editing. And “it’s an experiment” or “we can’t do X because it harms readership” only works for so long, especially when it’s repeatedly and blatantly putting the volunteer community at some kind of disadvantage to the paid teams.

Chris H, Elizabeth, Sonia, whoever… something I think you guys might not realize is that volunteers don’t operate on the same timeframes as staff does. To staff, who are committed to wikiHow full-time, “a long time” can be years; to a volunteer who can pop in just to post a new article or make some edits whenever they want, “a long time” can be several days (or even hours). And it’s so tiring constantly getting things stripped away from us, seeing new experiments we can’t touch, giving urgent feedback only to not see any surface-level action, and get responses like, “It’s an experiment.” When participating on the site is entirely voluntary and there isn’t necessarily something motivating you to stick around for years (as is the case with the majority of volunteers), “it’s an experiment” just starts sounding like code for, “We make the rules and decide what’s important around here. Deal with it.”

Two-way communication and collaboration is absolutely crucial on a wiki project. Lately it just doesn’t feel like we’re getting that anymore. It takes all of 30 seconds to send someone, “Let me look into this and get back to you,” and with my last email I didn’t even get the courtesy of that. Frankly, at this point, if the volunteer community doesn’t hold the same value or priority to staff that it used to, it would be less painful to hear that. Because the way things have been going lately – with the lack of communication, the recent focus on “staff authors,” the “squeaky wheel” approach it seems like staff’s been taking with me in particular when I raise a concern, and so forth – it feels more and more like we’re not valued here unless we bring readership to the site, and that staff just doesn’t have the respect for volunteers to tell us that outright. And I really hope that’s not the case.

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I completely agree with Alex. The fact that multiple community members have raised valid concerns about an article, these concerns have not been addressed, and the article keeps getting further edits is disheartening. This is not collaboration, which, like I mentioned earlier, is the foundation of all Wikis.

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What is WRM

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I totally agree, Alex. These articles now seem to be too um… “generalized” usually based on the majority (or stereotypes). Why did I love wikiHow so much when I first joined? Because I saw articles that articles were all-inclusive. And I know plenty of community articles still are. But with WRM articles, this is a missing factor – everything’s based on the majority, and everything’s so generalized. Really, I don’t like this type of generalization. For instance, plenty of articles have stuff like “if you’re in the US…” But what if you’re not? Just because most readers are from the US doesn’t mean all are. And although I understand things are different in different parts of the world, when the title doesn’t say it’s specific to the US, we should have something like “if you’re outside the US…” in articles, too.

Even if a non-LGBT+ person is writing an article, I believe it’s possible to put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Different people are going though different situations, and it’s not possible to generalize it and say something like “most parents will accept you” – most is clearly not all , different people have different situations – following these instructions in certain cases could put someone’s life at risk – and let’s say someone has abusive parent’s, would they really accept it?

And that’s what too mean to say – I agree with Matt.

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WRM is an account that’s used by wikiHow staff to publish articles. WRM actually stands for Wiki Raw Material. You can find out more if you visit WRM’s user page ( here ):slight_smile:

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Oh, that’s weird considering it is a bot… maybe someone can talk to Chris