Business type

Co-creation

Service/product description

wikiHow is a collaboration to build and share the world’s largest, highest quality how-to manual. wikiHow contains over 70,000 how-to guides in 7 languages, which are written, edited and maintained by thousands of volunteers. Over 20 million unique visitors per month turn to the website at http://www.wikiHow.com to learn how to do new things. Quantcast ranks wikiHow as the 130th most popular site on the web. wikiHow freely distributes its Creative Commons licensed content and open source software.

What does 'openness' mean in this case?

Openness is built into the infrastructure of wikiHow. Volunteer editors on the wiki have produced 70,000 articles which are all licensed under a Creative Commons license. Company staff produces and freely distributes open source software to run the site and downloadable software applications to enable more people to read the content. The site itself is managed and edited in such a way that decisions are made in the open with input from community members. Details below: Content: The heart of wikiHow is the 70,000 articles created, edited and maintained by thousands of volunteer editors. wikiHow permits even anonymous, unregistered users to edit and contribute articles. All of wikiHow’s articles are made available under a Creative Commons license. wikiHow content has been reused and shared by many organizations including UNICEF and the One Laptop Per Child project. These articles are read by over 20 million people per month on wikiHow.com alone and millions of others via other publication methods. Software: wikiHow runs on freely licensed open source software. wikiHow’s engineers have heavily modified the Mediawiki software and share their code for download and reuse (link here: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Powered-and-Inspired-by-MediaWiki). They are also one of the only companies to have a popular iPhone app (250,000+ downloads) built entirely on open source software they freely share (link here: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:IPhone). The software development philosophy is to build tools which allow anyone to use and adapt to suit their projects. Governance: Site policies are determined by volunteer editors and staff collaborating in quasi-democratic fashion on the site in a transparent manner. (Link: http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:Policy-Proposals/Amending-Policy-and-Achieving-Consensus). Site administrators who have extra powers to control the site are elected by volunteer editors. Infrastructure or software decisions implemented by staff are often discussed on public forums or over conference calls with volunteers. CoCreation: wikiHow embodies the concept of co-creation due to the mix of professional staff and volunteer labor who collaborate together to achieve an impressive product. Professional staff is primarily responsible for creating and maintaining the software and infrastructure of the project, while volunteers are primarily responsible for creating, editing and curating the project’s content.