10/10, Would Recommend!

They usually cover the basics of something pretty well, so I guess mostly positively? I use them maybe once a year at most though so no idea if they’re turning to garbage lately or not.

I was a volunteer admin on the site ~15 years ago. I think I still have privileges there, but haven’t been actively editing or adminning recently due to a long series of policy changes that removed almost all of the site’s appeal to users such as myself. The site split from ehow due to a founders’ dispute over the value of crowdsourcing and wiki-spirited openness. Now that wikihow is doing everything that Jack Herrick hated about ehow, I think it’s time to call his experiment a failure.

Most of the content is now being created by staff writers, often for advertising sponsors. Often not even a how-to topic. Many of these articles are fully protected. It’s very much the sort of crap I used to delete, when I was deleting crap for them. Most non-staff articles are hidden and unsearchable.

There is no quality control. Staff have openly embraced SEO and clickbait engagement metrics, at the expense of factual accuracy. This has resulted in the mass emigration of editors like me who used to provide fact-checking services. The “expert review” is a joke. It’s only there because Google thinks it makes the site credible. Google is wrong and are defrauding their searchers too.

There is no editing community anymore. Some children like the gamification aspects and use user spaces as a social media and chat site. It’s not well-suited for that purpose, but they’re children and don’t know any better. I think one editor from my era is still active. I don’t know why he’s still there.

They’re arguably violating the copyright of their editors by hiding the history tabs and denying CC-BY attribution. They did CYA by only using the CC licensing for external reuse, while granting wikihow broad rights to use submitted content commercially and without attribution. This policy was not as well advertised as the Creative Commons part, and no doubt some of the content creators from my era either didn’t notice, or expected wikihow to not abuse it. Hiding this also adversely affects readers’ ability to access an article’s reliability by checking for better versions and impedes the transition from reader to editor.

For the last decade or so I’ve always thought it was a weird site. I’ve maybe used if for a few questions, but most of the time I didn’t really get a sense of trustworthiness from it. I’ve not checked recently, but I could imagine it’s an ai slop hell hole?

Hot garbage. Really don’t think about it much these days.

Wife and I collaborated to write a pretty good article for them once. I guess we should have expected that it would get messed with, being that it’s a wiki, but they totally messed it up and it looked like we were spreading misinformation. Not really their fault, we chose the wrong platform to post on. The article did kinda go viral though, and she got a few people who contacted her from around the world and said the article helped them. So that was kinda neat. Now it’s like… AI slop, almost. I think I looked at our article once fairly recently, and they took the detailed photographs we’d provided and replaced them with something that looked generated by AI. If I had to guess, Devil’s Advocate kinda thing, maybe we didn’t specify the rights clearly enough with the photos we provided and they wanted something they could confidently host. So, I get that.

I’m not mad, hadn’t thought of it in a while, but it was kind of a negative experience. They took a good article on how to do something and made it worse at every step. It didn’t benefit the reader, anyone who was looking to follow our directions. So yeah, we just walked away. Even reading the headline, I had to stop and think “who/what?” for a moment.

I wouldn’t trust it. I have had it come up when I look for a solution to a puzzle (like in a game), but I don’t consider it a trusted source. And I think that’s a problem: if you can’t trust a wiki, whether it’s due to admins or users, what good is the wiki? I’m sure it’s good for someone (advertisers maybe?) but once they tell you something you know is not right, why would you trust them again? The same can happen on Wikipedia, but they take great pains to keep it from happening, in general.

I try not to think about it at all.

I don’t know anything about it other than the memeable illustrations, and even that only incidentally.