wikiHow opening up
Ross Mayfield at Many2Many has a terrific post about wikiHow, a project that he’s been usefully involved in. The post begins:
wikiHow is one of the more interesting cases of opening a proprietary content and community site. A couple of entrepreneurs bought eHow (editorially produced How To Guides, a dot com showcase) out of hock and appended a wiki to it. Today it may be the second fastest growing public wiki and they recently adopted Creative Commons licensing. The real story is the process of opening an asset, transitioning a community and how to be a net-enabled entrepreneur.
I poked around the site for a while. It’s got lots of potential, but could use more pages. Plus, as it takes off, will it generate the community of “wikihow-ians” required to keep the quality up? (In just a few minutes of looking, I quickly found some product-placement-style spam.) Also, there are some “how-to’s” — for example, how to deal with a child’s tantrum — that call out for listing alternatives.
Those questions aside, it’s a useful site and Ross’s article about it is very interesting and well done. [Technorati tags: wikihow RossMayfield wiki]
Happy to hear that you see the potential in wikiHow. Yes I agree that we need more pages and a larger community of “wikiHow-ians” dedicated to the site. Currently there are just a handful of us hard cores on the site every day. The good news is that more and more people are finding the site every day. Some small percentage of them stick around, start contributing and make the site a better place for future readers. It’s still very early for us, but I’m optimistic that wikiHow will one day be a great free resource that offers useful instructions to for almost any imaginable “how-to” problem.
Thanks for the blog post. As soon as I press submit on this comment, I’m going on to wikiHow to go delete that spam you found. :)
Jack, thanks for the reply.
As for the spam: I’d already deleted it. That’s what wikis are about, isn’t it? :)