Something like this would be good:
This asks for donations, and we could experiment with the same. None of us wants to fork and leave our lovely wikiHow staff behind. I really think wikiHow staff need to rethink their strategy.
Firstly, we should strive to play the SEO game—fairly. We have always ranked near the top of search results when searching for how-tos because we are wikiHow, a community-driven how-to site. We have always been concerned about readership and breaking links and all that. WMF has not ever strived to get high rankings on SEO; their pages rank high because of the free nature of their projects and because of the authoritative information present on their site.
Secondly, wikiHow is trusted as a how-to source because we have a large and diverse community. Sure we are smaller than Wikipedia, but we get hundreds of edits every day. Some days, the RC patrol backlog crosses 1000 or more. And yes, while wikiHow staff have degrees and whatnot, so do some community members. We are all an expert in our own field. We all know how to cite our sources in a manner that everyone can understand.
Thirdly, and this is going to be my biggest point: nothing should ever be hidden behind a paywall. We are a free how-to site first. We have strived to remain free as our mission is to empower people to do anything. If we start putting articles behind a paywall, people will flock elsewhere and maybe to even less authoritative sources (like Reddit or 8kun) for how-to advice.
Fourthly, we need to find a way to get money to support the site without degrading reader experience. I hate sites that have you “subscribe” to read more articles. We can run ads, we can run fundraisers, we can sell merch, we can auction off cat videos, but we CANNOTand SHOULD NOTput information behind paywalls.
If community members get frustrated, because of the right-to-fork, they are going to fork and work on wikiHow elsewhere. All CC licenses are irrevocable. With a very small staff, I can see that everyone at the wikiHow staff is concerned about getting money, and a small company managing a large site is very difficult. Even Wikimedia Foundation has a team of thousands of staff, handling issues with Wikipedia and MediaWiki. And WMF staff are also concerned about paychecks.
So wikiHow staff, go help the world. Go teach people how to fix their computer. Teach them about wine tasting or calculus. Just don’t put up paywalls. The existing paywalls should go. Or even better: have readers name a price. Give readers access to one expert Q&A, then have them name a price to get access to the rest. If they don’t want to pay, that’s okay. Someone else will.
On a side note, it would also be beneficial to have new contributions going forward that are by wikiHow community members licensed under CC BY-SA. I get that we do not want people making money off of wikiHow content, but it also prevents us from taking the fork to, let’s say, Wikimedia Foundation. I know you have spent a lot of time considering other options, but I think bold changes should get community input. If radical changes are made that community members do not like, and they feel like their voice is not being heard, then they will simply leave, set up their own wikiHow fork, register another domain, and trump wikiHow in search rankings, in the same way that the Uncyclopedia fork became more popular than the site on Fandom before Fandom Uncyclopedia was shut down.
