Who They Are

wikiHow is a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. It has a community of 75,000 volunteer editors dedicated to building, sharing, and improving how-to content. With just under 10 million unique visitors a month, wikiHow is the most popular wiki after Wikipedia.

YouTube and wikiHow

Video represents an important experiment for wikiHow. In some cases, a video can explain something in a way that just text and images can't. By adding video, wikiHow hopes to make their site even more useful for anyone wanting to learn how to do something new. You can contribute your how-to knowledge by uploading a video here.

What They Did

wikiHow created a Mediawiki extension in PHP based on the YouTube API specification and have shared this extension as under the GPL license at mediawiki.org so any Mediawiki site can add YouTube to their site in the same way. Over time, wikiHow will continue innovating on these video tools to make them more appropriate for an open content site such as wikiHow. For example, wikiHow is working on ways to make the raw footage of these videos more easily sharable with any other publisher. Their goal is to maintain wikiHow's "Right to Fork" which allows the wikiHow community to move and control all the content on wikiHow.

Users can fill in metadata and upload videos from wikiHow.com
The video is then embedded onto the page.

Impact

wikiHow hopes to see videos that really enhance wikiHow's educational mission, while simultaneously giving site editors another creative channel for sharing their expertise. Over time wikiHow will innovate with video tools to better leverage the collaborative, open content and "wiki" nature of our site. With the goal of building the world's best how-to manual, the better the tools that can be brought to this task, the better the how-to manual can be.