wikiHow: stories from the founder

24 Jul

Posted by Scott as community, wiki

Last week, Aaron and I were both able to attend the July edition of Toronto Wiki Tuesdays. This time around the speaker was Travis Derouin, lead engineer of the how-to Web site wikiHow.

While, as one attendee stated, there weren’t that many stories (as such), it was an interesting look at how the site works on a number of levels. And it was a good glimpse at the way in which a company is leveraging a wiki while both trying to make a profit and creating a community around useful content.

A little background

wikiHow started off as an offshoot of eHow, a highly funded and publicized online community providing instructional content on a variety of topics. Through a variety of twists and turns, wikiHow broke away from eHow and is now, according to Derouin, eHow’s biggest competitor.

The site runs on Mediawiki, the wiki engine behind Wikipedia. Derouin and his colleagues have developed a number of add-ons for their implementation of Mediawiki, many of which are specific to wikiHow. They try to give as much of their development as they can back to the Mediawiki community but Derouin pointed out that some of those add-ons won’t work outside the context of wikiHow.

The site’s revenue comes from Google ads. The ads appear on the left side of a typical wikiHow page, and at the end of articles. But users can also turn off the ads by clicking a link. If you’re logged in, you don’t see the ads. Both are a nice touch, which I’m sure adds to the good will that wikiHow gets from its community.

Licensing and community

All of the content on the wikiHow site is licensed under Creative Commons, specifically the Attribution – Share Alike license. This enables anyone to include wikiHow’s content on a Web site or blog as long as credit is given.

One interesting aspect of the license is that it gives the wikiHow community the right (with the site’s blessing) to fork the content if there’s a disagreement with the folks running wikiHow. Derouin admitted that there has been some friction between the business side of wikiHow and the community. Both sides, though, managed to deal with the conflict by being open and transparent.

The members of the community, Derouin said, have different motivations for using and contributing to wikiHow. Some just want to find useful information. Others find contributing articles (and editing them) fun and rewarding. Others just want to give back to a wider community, while others just enjoy collaborating over the Web.

Language

English is the predominant language on wikiHow, with over 57,000 articles in that language. In fact, there are far more articles in English than in all of the other languages supported on wikiHow combined. Derouin wasn’t entirely sure why that is.

He mentioned attempts that members of the wikiHow community made to translate the content into other languages. These were spearheaded by fluent in English and in other languages. But as time wore on, many of them lost interest or momentum, and went back to focusing their efforts on creating and curating (more about this in a moment) articles in English.

Editing and editors

One interesting aspect of wikiHow is that when someone writes or edits an article, it isn’t done in a WYSIWYG interface. Instead, they use wiki markup. But it’s not the traditional way of adding text to a wiki. wikiHow uses what’s called a Guided Editor. The Guided Editor adopts a structured approach to writing. Each section of an article — overview, introduction, procedure, etc. — has its own text entry box. Contributors build an article piece by piece.

Derouin mentioned that Guided Editor drew in up to 50% more edits to articles. On top of that, he said that it’s definitely easier to use than the traditional method of entering text into a wiki.

While people contributing articles to wikiHow come and go, some stick around and become editors. The editors take part in a process that the folks at wikiHow call content curation. They ensure that existing articles are accurate and up to date. For Derouin, content curation is as important as content creation. In fact, he pointed out, that pages with more edits garner more page views. And better-quality edits not only generate more page views over a longer period of time, but also give articles a better impression of accuracy.

Giving articles a boost

Derouin spent some time talking about an interesting editorial feature called new article boost. It’s a separate production queue in which editors can vet articles. That queue also allows editors to fix spelling errors, apply templates to an article, reconcile any duplication with existing articles, and check copyright violation. The latter is done by taking a sample from an article and running it through Google. That works fairly well, according to Derouin. One audience member suggested that wikiHow look into using Copyscape for that.

He also noted that while the new article boost feature is popular, to use it editors need a higher level of reputation. To get that, editors have to be quite active.

Video and images help, too

Plain text works, but wikiHow contributors can also include images from Flickr that are under a Creative Commons license as well as video from a number of online video sharing sites. With video, users can choose the service (for example, YouTube) which will be the source of the video. Then, the API between wikiHow and the video site returns a selection that the contributor can choose from. The choices are, obviously, based on the subject matter of an article — for example, changing a bicycle inner tube. Choose the video, and code that links to the video is embedded in the article.

Obviously, the videos (and images) are there to supplement the text in an article. They don’t illustrate the steps in a how to. Well, they can if the contributor shoots his or her own video. But, as Derouin stated, wiki editing is very different from video creation and editing.

Looking to the future

Derouin admitted that there are areas in which wikiHow needs to improve. He’d like to see better integration with so-called Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Twitter. He’d also like to encourage more visitors to contribute content. At the moment, only around 0.09% of visitors write articles.

Another area that wikiHow wants to improve is the breadth to the articles and their topics. Derouin pointed out that wikiHow isn’t going to become more like Wikipedia. He highlighted the main differences between the two: wikiHow is more hands-on, while Wikipedia is more of a reference.

Enhancing the overall quality of those articles is also a goal and that will be accomplished by a combination of improving the level of writing and better content curation. Like any other Web site, wikiHow has to deal with visitors looking at a couple of articles, then leaving the site. Decreasing the bounce rate is important, and the folks at wikiHow are monitoring this using Google Analytics.

While wikiHow is still growing, it shows that you can build a community around content. And, obviously, a wiki is an ideal platform for creating and delivering that content. The big challenge is sustaining the momentum of growth. Then again, most online communities have to face that.