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by ringzero 2342 days ago
Does the content on wikihow not deliver on what it promises to do? And if so, have you considered editing it - given that it’s a wiki?

Of the things destroying the internet (Google AMP, and Pinterest, in that order), I wouldn’t include wikihow.
1 comments
notatoad 2342 days ago
No, the content on wikiHow does not deliver. It promises to help you learn how to do something, and I have never successfully used a wikiHow article to learn how to do anything. The content is so low-quality as to be useless.

And "it's a wiki" isn't a defense. What is my motivation to improve it? Nobody trusts wikiHow anyways, so contributing would just be creating more content that nobody should trust.

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drewbug01 2342 days ago
“What is my motivation to improve it” is an excellent question in my opinion, and worthy of discussion. I don’t know if I have an answer to it, but I do know that there isn’t really another Wikihow-like place out there that’s better. So at least my default answer would be “improve it because it’s better than starting from scratch.”

I do overall disagree with the thrust of your comment, though: your anecdote and mine cancel each other out. You haven’t been helped; I have! On balance I think they are helpful. I don’t have access to the statistics anymore but from what I remember, more people interacting with the website rated articles positively than not.

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notatoad 2342 days ago
the wikihow-like place that's better is the entire internet. It contains more useful information than wikihow does (by definition, because it contains wikihow).

wikihow could be valuable if the content it contained had some generally assumed level of authority that was better than the internet at large, so you could assume that a wikihow article was more trustworthy than any other random result from google. as long as wikihow articles can't be assumed to be more helpful than any other google search result, google is a superior alternative to wikihow.

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asxd 2340 days ago
I feel that this a somewhat circular argument. The wikipedia-like place that's better is also the entire internet, no?
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