“About wikiHow” “The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Edit”

1. “About wikiHow”“The How-To Manual That Anyone Can Edit” Presented By: Valerie Fuecker Engl 393/301 March 12, 2007

2. Introduction • What is wikiHow? • How does wikiHow work? • How can you help? • Guidelines of the wikiHow community

3. What is wikiHow? • It is a collaborative writing project whose aim is to build the world’s largest how-to manual. • Its purpose is to provide useful and free instructions for people to use to solve problems of everyday life. • Currently there are 16,737 articles on wikiHow, with new articles being created daily, and past articles being improved upon. • The ultimate goal of wikiHow is to provide “free, unbiased, accurate instructions on almost every topic imaginable.”

4. How does wikiHow work? • The site is a ‘wiki’ • A website that anyone can write and edit • Process: • A visitor to wikiHow creates a new page about how to do something • After the new page is submitted, any other visitor can then edit, improve, or change the page • Whenever a change is made to a page, there is an area that displays ‘recent changes’ and also in the ‘page history’ • Because users are trusted by the wikiHow admin to behave in a manner which helps others, vandalism, non appropriate material, and other miscellaneous material that does not pertain to a how-to manual is quickly removed

5. How can you help? • It starts with sharing your knowledge! • Create a new page of something that you know how to do • If you need ideas for topics, you can choose from a list of topic requests made by other users • Editing an existing page • If you think that an existing how-to manual could be improved upon, press the ‘edit this page’ button • The contributions made by wikiHow users help millions of people EVERY MONTH learn how to do something new • Just think… by writing an article about something you know how to do, you could be helping someone on the other side of the world learn something new!!

6. Guidelines of the wikiHow community • A civil group effort • Users must expect that their writing may be modified, criticized, or improved by others • When changes are made to a how-to page, they should be viewed as an improvement and not as criticism on the author’s original abilities or the approach taken • When editing someone else’s work, users must also be friendly, civil, and supportive • Personal attacks should never be made • REMEMBER! wikiHow is a GROUP effort… When users disagree, differences should be talked about civilly; those who cannot cooperate with this will be discouraged or prevented from participating in the community

7. Guidelines cont. • Helpful Instructions • “wikiHows should help people solve their everyday problems. We believe that profanity, sexually charged, sexually explicit, hate based, recreational drug focused, joke topics, societal instructions, and vanity pages are inappropriate for wikiHow. Topics that pose very high odds of injury or death or are universally illegal will be deleted. wikiHows that are written using Reverse Logic, Satire or Sarcasm will be also be deleted.”

8. Guidelines cont. • Limit egregious self-advertising • wikiHow was not created for people to promote products • Users should refrain from articles created just to promote a specific business without providing useful insights • Users are welcome to post external links, but the wikiHow community reserves the right to delete the links or entire articles that are over stepping the boundaries of self-advertising

9. The End • Any questions?