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-how 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, as well as spawned numerous memes from various images and illustrations on the site, such as Please Do Not The Cat and Hard to Swallow Pills.

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 a 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/disneyvacation,^[39] /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