I’ve been thinking things over since Zack’s response, and I’ve been going back and forth over whether to post this for quite some time now. I’m honestly scared to post it, because one thought turned into another one and it ended up snowballing, but… I need to, because Jayne has gotten enough distressed emails from me. And part of me wants to share it in case the community has any thoughts on what I’ve said, and wants to add their own input; the other part knows that my post is probably going to send Jayne and Chris H into damage control mode (sorry, guys) and I may as well just be thorough. And I really hope anyone reading this can take this as I intend it: not to tear anyone down, be harsh or overly critical, or burn bridges, but to share an outside perspective and give some things to think about.
And Jayne, just FYI, my earlier email still stands.
But, honestly? In spite of our efforts last year to fix things, the volunteer community still feels like it’s dissipating. And I think a lot of it comes down to a seeming disorganization within the company that, to someone outside of the company, probably feels like it’s compromising the core values of wikiHow.
I love everyone on staff, don’t get me wrong, and I know a lot of chaos comes from how rapidly the webscape evolves and how small the team is. But I noticed a lot of sudden and scattered communication happening within the company this summer, when I was given the opportunity to intern with the content team. I’m still so happy I got the opportunity; aside from enjoying the work, we have a wonderful team and I can tell everyone wants to support both the website and the volunteer community. It’s also given me more perspective on how things function on the staff end of things, and I’ve recognized some parallels. Namely, the way changes are being implemented as of late are almost a direct match to what I saw while interning: on a moment’s notice with no opportunity for negotiation. A lot ended up communicated after the fact, too. It was confusing (and, frankly, a bit frustrating) even when I could reach out directly to a staff member for clarification, and now that I’ve finished interning and my primary point of contact with staff is Jayne, I’ve found myself even more confused than before, because I no longer have any of the background context. And in a wiki setting, this sort of on-the-fly incomplete communication (particularly around new rules that remove or severely limit volunteer tasks) risks destroying the community spirit, because no matter how well-intentioned it is, it ultimately goes against the collaborative nature of a wiki.
This disorganization is also apparent even on the reader-facing end of the site. Articles are written in a casual, friendly, and empathetic tone, but paid content (well, the ads, at least, because truthfully I have no interest in the courses) is overly professional. Designs change from creative, cutesy, and unique, to sterile, hard-lined, and sometimes carbon copies of the “corporate art style” that every tech company is using now. At points, we don’t even adhere to basic UX laws. Honestly, it’s whiplash even to me, because it feels like wikiHow is having an identity crisis. Are we trying to be taken seriously and seem professional and authoritative, or are we wanting to seem like a silly and casual website that makes fun of ourselves? There’s a way to do both, I’m sure, but this feels like multiple people’s individual ideas are jammed together without regard for cohesion. I’m worried the site and its reputation is suffering for it.
There’s also a lot of “trading” of tasks within staff, and it feels like somewhere along the way, the volunteer tasks somehow were traded to staff, while we’ve ended up getting staff tasks that we’re simply not equipped to handle. I noticed this the most with the category redesign: that’s something that requires formal education in graphic design and UX, and yet it ended up falling to a bunch of teenagers and 20-somethings to figure out how to fix it. It was abundantly clear we had no idea what we were doing, and the only thing that really changed afterwards was the sizing of the tiles (which made a difference, don’t get me wrong, but that just changed my criticism from “let’s do X, Y, and Z” to “it still looks wrong but I can’t tell you how or why”). Meanwhile, the vast majority of content work has been delegated to staff and contracted teams. I know the slower pace of volunteer contributions isn’t compatible with how quickly we need to adapt for SEO purposes, but it kills the magic of contributing when most new content is already rolled out in a complete or mostly-complete state (and, honestly, when a lot of recent content feels clickbaity, tabloid-esque, and/or like it’s being written because it’s popular rather than out of a genuine passion to help someone. Even my intern work didn’t feel that SEO-driven).
For all of this, volunteers have been thrown to the bottom of the priority list. More and more core aspects of a wiki keep being shut off; either we’re told that we need to stop doing something because “it hurts readership” with little hope of us getting it back (and a fight required to maintain use of that thing at all), or we get some new feature – but only staff can use it (e.g. custom display titles), and who knows if or when we’ll get to beta test it. Dashboard tools are emptied and/or disabled and then just never come back. Articles are permanently moved to subdomains without our input, without us having any obvious way to tell that it happened (and I have reason to believe the subdomains may be harming readership in some cases). In general, our concerns are taking longer to be addressed; bugs in the volunteer-facing segments of the site are going unfixed for longer and longer. I’ve sent Wikivisual requests to fix image issues that could make readers feel uncomfortable or unwelcome, and they aren’t handled until weeks or months later even when the changes don’t require that much effort. Anons especially get the short end of the stick – most access points for account creation have been cut off and/or replaced with ads and donation requests, no anons can edit the Sandbox anymore, and IPv6 anons have been unable to edit for over a year even though almost 50% of the US uses IPv6 now. The community is shrinking, and I’m worried it may not recover.
And while this is more of a communication issue than an organizational one, I’m just going to be honest: the lack of communication about the paid content nearly drove me to quit. I didn’t share this at first because I didn’t want to start trouble, but before this Labs post, I accidentally discovered that the paywalls on expert Q&As and samples had been rolled out indiscriminately – to the point they were on articles aimed at low-income readers and children – and had no opt-out (or even a prompt to sign up for a free account) despite me saying at least twice to staff that readers may not be able to afford even a dollar donation. The last we had heard about these paywalls was around December 2020, so how long it’s been like that is anyone’s guess, and I had no chance to notice and say something earlier because they’re completely hidden to signed-in users. Even though I’m sure nobody actively thought to pull the wool over readers’ or volunteers’ eyes, I felt like I’d been deceived into supporting a project actively going against my values, and was so mentally shattered by it that I couldn’t focus in class or even bring myself to eat for several days.
I really appreciate that staff is getting community input on what to remove the paywalls from; I don’t want to start trouble, I really don’t. But I feel I have to share this here, too, because people deserve to know – whether they’re part of the community, who also seem unaware that this happened, or part of staff, who need to know that this feels to me like we’ve compromised wikiHow’s Mission. Our goal is to help anyone, and that includes readers who can’t pay for content. Potential financial inaccessibility should have been accounted for, at least to some degree, before the paywalls were ever rolled out. This has shaken me and I’m still torn on where to go from here, because I know
I said something, I’m struggling to believe this was an accident with the scale of the rollout, and everything with paid content is kept so secret that I don’t even know who to take this to. The paid content models were first announced in July 2020, I’ve been fairly active since then, and even I can’t figure out anything about the paid content or who’s handling it.
I know some of the forced mysteriousness has to do with legal and financial concerns, which the volunteers need to be left out of. And I recognize this specific comment may not be a universal opinion among the community. But with how often certain megacorporations have been in the news lately, I need to point this out: With how many corporations and startups (particularly in tech) start off seemingly “good” and then start making more and more ethically questionable choices, it doesn’t matter if we know you guys as individuals have good intent – the secrecy around the paid content looks suspicious, potentially even untrustworthy. The average community member doesn’t have nearly enough background information to know whether this comes from desperation or something more sinister; the average reader has even less. And after discovering how the paywall rollout was handled, I don’t know if I can continue to support wikiHow if this secrecy doesn’t change, because once money gets involved, I can’t ethically handwave this kind of thing.
… I really hate to bring all this frustration and negativity to the table without any suggestions or solutions. But things are under such lock-and-key nowadays that just months after my internship, I can’t really tell what’s going on anymore, so I don’t know what to suggest. And I don’t have the knowledge or skillset to solve issues that are happening within the business, whether that’s related to SEO, revenue, or anything else. All I know is that most of my wikiFriends here have left – either gone inactive and rarely (if ever) pop back in, or have outright quit. Now that the GoogleMonster has basically forced me out of writing on diagnostic or disability topics, I’m feeling progressively more useless for anything beyond pointing out problems that need to be fixed, and I don’t want that to be my role here. At 21, the kind of companies I should be taking action to hold accountable are polluters contributing to climate disaster. Not a well-intentioned startup that’s just trying to avoid death by Google.
