So at risk of starting trouble again (I swear my goal in life isn’t to fight people on everything), I want to quote and agree with something Aasim said in another thread when it comes to premium content and access to the Q&A:
I’m disappointed. This was brought up at the virtual meetup, I specifically pointed out that not everyone can afford to pay these things even if it’s on a sliding scale (especially now that COVID has decimated the job market and people’s finances), and we were told there would be a way to access the answers without having to pay. I checked signed-out and there isn’t a way for signed-out users to access the answers without paying at least a dollar.
I know we need to make money and I will not fault anyone for that, but I just don’t see the reason to block “Staff Answers” and expert answerers behind a paywall period
, considering that not only are these on the main article page and were not obviously going to be bundled with wikiHow Pro, but many of the answers (particularly from the experts) are just restating the article title - which is something we’re specifically not
supposed to do in accordance with Q&A Patrol guidelines - and/or have more Not Helpful than Helpful votes. It seems really low of us to block an expert answer behind a paywall when that expert is only answering the article title or answering it incorrectly. Especially because some of these questions aren’t submitted by readers in the first place.
3 Likes