Hey wikiHowians,
I want to share an important update about our licensing policies and how we’re evolving to protect the content we create together.
BackgroundWhen we started wikiHow in 2005, the internet was drastically different from what we all interact with now. In some ways, that version of the web feels almost unrecognizable relative to the modern internet and the nature of content creation today. Despite these changes, wikiHow has taken pride in being a place that continues to emphasize high-quality content produced by real people with real experience looking to help others. With the help of this community, we have ridden and survived the waves of those changing times in a way that, we feel, is true to the wikiHow ethos. Unfortunately, in this changed internet, AI, large companies, and other actors have stolen and misused wikiHow’s content. We have all put 20 years of hard work into making wikiHow the resource it is today — we know it as a place that helps people in real, meaningful ways, whether its how to have your first kiss, how to change the oil in your car, how to be a more empathetic friend, and many other ways (hundreds of thousands, in fact). Yet for some of these external parties, all that work is merely reduced to a collection of tokens for their model’s usage without credit to the incredible community that’s been built here over the decades. Frustratingly, these models and companies are not only blatantly violating our Terms of Use and IP rights for all non-user content, but even for user content they’re violating the requirements of the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license by using it for commercial purposes and not providing appropriate attribution.
After lots of thoughtful discussion, we have concluded that the Creative Commons License is no longer serving its initial, intended purpose in today’s internet. What made sense in 2005 simply doesn’t align with the realities of the modern web.
What’s Happening?As a result, wikiHow will be removing the Creative Commons licensing entirely from its platform. Since it only applies to user-created content, it wasn’t applicable to a large portion of the site anyway, but to avoid confusion it will be removed completely. As a result, no new user-created content will be available for reuse outside of wikiHow under the conditions of the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license. This means that while you and other contributors still own your work, others can’t use it outside of wikiHow without gaining explicit permission from you. To reiterate: you will still continue to own the copyright of the content you provide.
We will begin implementing this change immediately, but it may take a little time before it’s rolled out completely to all relevant pages and processes, so please bear with us.
How This Affects UsFor the community, nothing will change in how we collaborate and improve both articles and the site itself. Really, this is just impacting external usage of user-submitted content. The User Content License Grants in our Terms of Use are mostly the same — you will still grant the same license to wikiHow when you submit content and you will still grant a license to other users that allows them to modify and adapt the content. The key change is that ability will be limited to within wikiHow and this user content won’t be licensed out for non-commercial use with attribution externally via CC. As was the case even before this change, content created by wikiHow Staff remains owned by wikiHow and is not licensed out.
We know this may feel like a big shift, so we appreciate your understanding as we navigate these new frontiers to keep us around for the next 20 years!
