About
WikiHow is an online resource community that offers step-by-step guides on how to complete various tasks that may require a certain level of prerequisite knowledge or skills.The website features over 190,000 instructional articles on a broad range of tasks, typically accompanied by visual aids, tips and warnings to assist the readers in acquiring the necessary know-hows to achieve their end goals. Since its launch in 2005, many Wikihow articles have gained online notoriety due to the over-explanatory or oversimplified nature of the content.
History
The website was founded by American internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick on January 15th, 2005 in honor of the anniversary of Wikipedia, which was launched four years prior on January 15th, 2001. The concept of the website was in part inspired by the success of Wikipedia’s open source and crowdsourced content model, as well as the limitations of eHow, another online how-to website that Herrick had previously acquired with his business partner Josh Hannah in 2004.
In 2006, Herrick and Hannah sold eHow to Demand Media, enabling Herrick to focus on the development of wikiHow in full-time capacity. Wikihow is a hybrid organization (a for-profit company run for a social mission); all of its content is licensed under a Creative Commons license and its software MediaWiki is freely available for download and modification. On September 21st, 2007, WikiHow published its 25,000th article, “How to Make an Eiskaffee (Creamy Iced Coffee)." In 2009, the website surpassed 20 million monthly visitors and completed a redesign.
Online Presence
WikiHow maintains an active presence in the social media through a number of official accounts on various platforms, including a Twitter[5] feed, Tumblr[4] blog, Facebook[6] page and YouTube[34] channel. As of February 2016, WikiHow has 63,500 followers on Twitter, 2.78 million likes on Facebook and just over 4,000 subscribers on YouTube.
Reception
Since its launch, WikiHow has received a number of awards and accolades; In 2008, WikiHow was chosen by Mashable as the runner-up for best wiki site in Open Web Awards; In 2009, WikiHow won a Webby Award for Community; In 2010, WikiHow won the Co-Creation award in The Guardian and Nesta’s Open Innovation competition; In 2014, Google selected wikiHow as one of the launch partners for Google Contributor, an ad-free internet product.
Fandom
The Internet’s ironic appreciation for WikiHow has been steadily gaining momentum since as early as December 2010, mainly through several single topic blogs on Tumblr and Twitter that are devoted to curating odd and bizarre “how-to” guides and visual aids, including Fuck Yeah WikiHow[36], WikiHuh[27], WikiHow Ridiculous Is This[26], WikiFAILs[37], WikiHow Illustrations[25], WikiHow Out-of-Context[38] and @WikiHowArt[33], as well as the /r/weirdwikihow[31] and /r/wikiwhat[30] subreddits on Reddit.
Blog Coverage
Some of the more bizarre “how-to” articles and exploitable visual illustrations within them have been highlighted in the form of listicles by a wide range of Internet humor and viral media aggregation sites; On February 3rd, 2009, Cracked[15] ran an article titled “The 11 Most Unnecessary ‘How To’ Guides on the Web”; On June 28th, 2011, Listverse[20] ran a post titled “Top 15 Funny and Bizarre Wikipedia Pages”; In 2013, BuzzFeed[12] and The Huffington Post[13] ran similar articles; In 2014, Imgur[10] user MoSj submitted a compilation of funny illustrations from the site in a post titled “Wikihow is a treasure trove of amazing art,” Jezebel[9] published an article titled “15 Utterly Deranged Wikihow How-To Guides” and The Independent[11] ran an article titled “24 gloriously weird wikiHow guides”; In 2015, Something Awful[21], Mental Floss[35] and CollegeHumor[17][18] ran similar listicles highlighting select “how-to” articles.
Traffic
According to Alexa[24], WikiHow is ranked the 188th most visited website in the United States and the 220th most visited website in the world, while Comscore ranks WikiHow in the top 150 most visited publishers in the world. According to the company, the website is used by over 100 million people per month.
Search Interest
External References
[5]Twitter – @WikiHow’s Account
[7]New York Times – New Web Sites Seeking Profit in Wiki Model
[8]Encyclopedia Dramatica – WikiHow
[9]Jezebel – 15 Utterly Deranged Wikihow How-To Guides
[10]Imgur – Wikihow is a treasure trove of amazing art
[11]The Independent – 24 gloriously weird wikiHow guides
[12]BuzzFeed – The 17 Most Perfect WikiHow Articles Ever Written
[13]The Huffington Post – 11 Bizarre Life Skills You Could Only Learn From Wikihow
[14]Offbeat – The 14 Most Hilarious Wikihow Tutorials of All Time
[15]Cracked – The 11 Most Unnecessary ‘How To’ Guides on the Web
[16]The Daily Edge – 9 brilliantly bizarre WikiHow articles that will fix all your life problems
[17]College Humor – 16 WTF WikiHows That Answer Questions You Didn’t Think Needed to be Asked
[18]College Humor – 20 Times WikiHow Gave Us The Instructions We Desperately Needed
[19]IGN Forum – One of the weirdest WikiHow articles I’ve ever read
[20]Listverse – Top 15 Funny and Bizarre Wikipedia Pages
[21]Something Awful – The Art of WikiHow
[22]Wikhowl – The How-to Manual That YOU Can Laugh At
[23]Tumblr – How to distance yourself from anime
[24]Alexa – Wikihow.com
[25]Tumblr – Wikihow Illustrations
[26]Tumblr – Wikihow Ridiculous Is This
[28]Tumblr – Tagged Results for wikihow
[29]Tumblr – Search Results for wikihow
[30]Reddit – /r/wikiwhat
[31]Reddit – /r/weirdwikihow
[32]Reddit – Search Results for Wikihow
[33]Twitter – @WikiHowArt
[34]YouTube – WikiHow’s Channel
[35]MentalFloss – The History of wikiHow in 7 Fascinating wikiHow Articles
[36]Tumblr – FuckYeahWikiHow
[38]Tumblr – Wikihow Out of Context