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WikiHow - Community-Powered How-To Manual


Looks like I missed this one back in January - wikiHow is a collaborative how-to manual from the people behind eHow. But while eHow only allows staff members to write articles, wikiHow takes more Web 2.0 approach. In the new-school wiki way, they're allowing anyone to create or edit the articles on the site. The blurb:

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest how-to manual. With your contributions, we can create a free resource that helps people by offering clear, concise solutions to the problems of everyday life. wikiHow currently contains 6567 articles written, edited, and maintained primarily by volunteers. Please join us by writing a new page, or editing a page that someone else has started.

Back when Squidoo launched, I saw it as for Web 2.0. In the same way, Zimbio (not yet launched) is taking a bottom-up approach by allowing users to create their own topic-based portals. Ditto Jeteye and Boxxet. WikiHow does much the same, but the wiki approach makes it stand out from the crowd (it's built on MediaWiki, by the way). The big disadvantage of wikis is that they take a lot of monitoring - spam and misinformation can stay up for days before anyone notices. But it looks like the wikiHow team are keeping it under control - good luck to 'em.

[via Alex Bosworth]

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