10/10, Would Recommend!

I’ve only ever used it for simple, low consequence things, like how to tie a certain knot. But even then, I’ve never gone to wikiHow directly, I only visit if it happens to be one of the first search results

I don’t know anything about it other than the memeable illustrations, and even that only incidentally.

Hot garbage. Really don’t think about it much these days.

Wife and I collaborated to write a pretty good article for them once. I guess we should have expected that it would get messed with, being that it’s a wiki, but they totally messed it up and it looked like we were spreading misinformation. Not really their fault, we chose the wrong platform to post on. The article did kinda go viral though, and she got a few people who contacted her from around the world and said the article helped them. So that was kinda neat. Now it’s like… AI slop, almost. I think I looked at our article once fairly recently, and they took the detailed photographs we’d provided and replaced them with something that looked generated by AI. If I had to guess, Devil’s Advocate kinda thing, maybe we didn’t specify the rights clearly enough with the photos we provided and they wanted something they could confidently host. So, I get that.

I’m not mad, hadn’t thought of it in a while, but it was kind of a negative experience. They took a good article on how to do something and made it worse at every step. It didn’t benefit the reader, anyone who was looking to follow our directions. So yeah, we just walked away. Even reading the headline, I had to stop and think “who/what?” for a moment.

I wouldn’t trust it. I have had it come up when I look for a solution to a puzzle (like in a game), but I don’t consider it a trusted source. And I think that’s a problem: if you can’t trust a wiki, whether it’s due to admins or users, what good is the wiki? I’m sure it’s good for someone (advertisers maybe?) but once they tell you something you know is not right, why would you trust them again? The same can happen on Wikipedia, but they take great pains to keep it from happening, in general.

For the last decade or so I’ve always thought it was a weird site. I’ve maybe used if for a few questions, but most of the time I didn’t really get a sense of trustworthiness from it. I’ve not checked recently, but I could imagine it’s an ai slop hell hole?

I try not to think about it at all.