wikiHow is a collaborative effort by knowledge philanthropists who have created the world’s most helpful how-to guides. A goldmine of easily understood articles and videos for free.
I stumbled onto this site because I had a craving for a baked potato but didn’t have the time to make it. I had always baked my baked potatoes but never used the quicker microwave method. I googled my dilemma and wikHow appeared.
A quick, concise article and five video clips showed me how to be an expert at nuking the spuds in a flash. And it tasted quite delicious–rubbing olive oil into the skin was a stupendous suggestion. While I ate, I went back to the site and marveled at the treasure trove of how-to guides contained there. I highly recommend checking out wikiHow and I’ll let the knowledge philanthropists tell ya all about the place…
Imagine a world where anyone can easily learn how to do anything. A world where access to comprehensive step-by-step instructions in multiple languages enables billions of people to improve their lives, in both ordinary and extraordinary ways. That’s the world we want to create.
At wikiHow, a community of knowledge philanthropists are collaborating to create this world. We are driven by a shared passion to create a high-quality collection of how-to guides. We keep improving each article until we think it has become the single most helpful set of step-by-step instructions available on that topic anywhere.
While we recognize that this ambitious goal will take years to accomplish, we take pleasure in knowing that we already help millions of people every day.
What we do
wikiHow is a collaborative effort to create the world’s most helpful how-to guides. Like Wikipedia, wikiHow is a wiki, in that anyone can write or edit a page on the site. Thousands of people from all over the world have collaboratively written 167,285 how-to articles. Over 40 million people a month read wikiHow according to Google Analytics and Quantcast ranks us as the 150th most popular website.
Who we are
A vibrant volunteer community of writers and editors from dozens of countries form the core of wikiHow. Everyone who contributes to wikiHow does it because it’s fun. Other common reasons people contribute include the desire to help others, the joy of collaborating on something larger than any individual could achieve independently, the thrill of being read by a very large audience, and the desire to build real world skills like writing and leadership.
wikiHow founder, Jack Herrick and a small paid staff of full time employees help keep wikiHow moving forward. Our headquarters are in a house, yes a house, in downtown Palo Alto, California.
How wikiHow works
Because wikiHow is editable by anyone, our content changes every day. Each edit can be seen on our list of Recent Changes, which gets reviewed constantly. Volunteer recent changes patrollers quickly revert poor edits. Several other quality control tools work together to make sure each article improves over time, as more and more people contribute their unique knowledge and skills.
We share our instructions freely via a Creative Commons license that allows wikiHows’ to be republished by any organization or person for any non-commercial purpose. We also freely share all our open source software.
We consider ourselves a hybrid organization, a for-profit company focused on creating a global public good in accordance with our mission. We support ourselves financially by showing optional advertising. Yet, we don’t think that ads should be shoved down your throat. We allow anyone to opt-out of ads by simply registering an account to join our editor community.
Want to learn more? Take the wikiHow tour.