
WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines - pslattery
https://onezero.medium.com/we-finally-figured-out-who-makes-wikihows-bizarre-art-6c5d69b71347
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usrusr
> wikiHow instructed these freelancers on how “to create the most instructive
> visuals for every step of every article.”

Hopefully written and illustrated in genuine wikihow style

~~~
beamatronic
Talk about dogfooding!

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musicale
Wikihow is gold mine of often hilariously bizarre tracings of stock or staged
photos.

What surprises me is that there is no Wikihow filter for photoshop and
instagram. So consider this my free gift to any enterprising HN reader who
wants to make a small fortune with a wikihowification mobile app.

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deerIRL
[https://outline.com/wMXGZf](https://outline.com/wMXGZf)

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zadkey
On a tangential note, there is r/disneyvacation/ that pokes fun aty the bad
drawings on wikihow and recaptions them.

~~~
jordigh
Not tangential: it is mentioned and linked in the article.

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tobenortobe
I have noticed this long ago when they put frozen tongue instructions[0], yet
still i find instructions quite informative

[0][https://m.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Stuck-Tongue-from-a-Frozen-
Su...](https://m.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Stuck-Tongue-from-a-Frozen-Surface)

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jpalomaki
Lot’s of images, similar style, creative commons license.

This sounds like an interesting dataset for fun project to generate images
based on descriptions.

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greatgib
Thank you very much OP for the clear title that save me a lot of time not
wasted figuring out the reply to the clickbait title of the original article.
If only the guys that are posting New York times articles and co could do the
same...

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mellosouls
_Getting to the bottom of one of the internet’s most ridiculously drawn
mysteries_

Seems like quite a snotty article tbh.

WikiHow's art has always reminded me of "How it Works" style children's books,
it seems functional and clearly has made an impression in some quarters.

By all means shed some light on it if that's interesting; I don't see the need
for the condescending attitude though.

~~~
dlivingston
Devoid of context of the parent WikiHow article, the images are often
surrealist and bizarre, which is why they've become something of a subcategory
of memes.

Please look at the images in the article, if you haven't already. I made more
than one audible guffaw just scrolling through them.

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wyclif
That illustration for "how to protect yourself from dogs while walking"
doesn't appear on the current WikiHow entry. Did someone edit the entry and
remove it or add different art?

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scohesc
Man, what is that headline font?

~~~
jaynetics
It's hilarious. I've just learned a bit of Cyrillic during holidays, and even
I can hardly stop reading it as "OpeZego" and so on. It must be almost
unreadable for people from the many countries with a Cyrillic alphabet.

~~~
orbital-decay
You can't imagine how often it happens when someone is trying to appear
"Russian" or just trying to be fancy. As a native speaker, you can't help but
keep reading it in Cyrillic, and the result is completely garbled.

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
The hall of fame includes "Tetyais" and "Boyadt".

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beamatronic
This is the perfect opportunity for a new wikiHow article!

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neonate
[http://archive.md/Aqd4f](http://archive.md/Aqd4f)

~~~
blep-arsh
Huh, does Medium just respond 404 when you try to visit it in incognito mode?

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paulpauper
wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results
with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not
just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by
creating guides for things that don't even make sense

~~~
drewbug01
> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image
> results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue.
> It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword
> spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense

[citation needed]

But, seriously - you're alleging that they're a content farm. Can you
substantiate that at all? Because from where I sit - as a former employee - I
can attest that people working there genuinely believe in their mission to
"teach anyone how to do anything." Moreover: it's a wiki! You can edit it!
They have a thriving community of editors (not paid editors: community
editors!) who work on the site, and frankly I don't think that describes
content farms.

Calling wikiHow a cancer on the internet is just a huge overreach - there are
actual content farms out there doing what you allege. wikiHow isn't one of
them. It's absolutely fair to criticize the quality of the articles if you
wish - but again; it's a wiki. Feel free to get involved if you don't like the
quality.

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vbtemp
> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image
> results with inane how-to guides

This 100x over. I've been trying to find a convenient way to block the domain
from all my devices. It's all just utterly content-free cyber squatting.

~~~
ringzero
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.

~~~
notatoad
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.

~~~
drewbug01
“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.

~~~
notatoad
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.

~~~
asxd
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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oefrha
Please don’t editorialize titles, four out of five times the editorialized
title is strictly worse, and often it’s straight up _wrong_ , like in this
case. If you don’t like the original title due to omission of info, you can at
least use the HTML title:

> wikiHow’s art is made by a _global_ network of freelancers, _primarily_ in
> the Philippines.

(Emphasis mine.)

~~~
colmvp
OP's headline saves you a click, versus the original title: "We Finally
Figured Out Who Makes wikiHow’s Bizarre Art"

~~~
tptacek
Saving a click is probably an anti-goal of HN article titles.

~~~
solarkraft
I honestly prefer a headline that tells me a bit of the main point over one
that doesn't.

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flanbiscuit
Blocked reading the article because medium wants me to sign in.

Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a
setting that this subdomain turned on?

~~~
puranjay
Medium is quickly going down the Quora path for me. The content quality is
becoming poorer as more and more people use it as a place to dump their zero-
traffic blog posts.

The aggressive content gating and pop-ups are another Quora-esque
introduction.

Just a case of being blinded by metrics. Adding an aggressive sign-up form
might get you more emails and sign-ups, but it will also annoy away better
quality users.

~~~
kbumsik
It is worse than Quora now because Medium not only requires sign-ins bit asks
for subscription to read.

~~~
bubblethink
It is also worse than quora because quora can be blocked easily in search
results since it is one domain. People use medium with their own domains too,
which makes it hard to block entirely.

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peterwwillis
_" To keep reading this story, create a free account."_

This is actually great. I won't create an account, so I've spent a lot less
time reading empty posts on Medium and more time just going about my day.

~~~
andai
ctrl+shift+n

~~~
RandomGuyDTB
ctrl+shift+p on firefox

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bluntfang
is "army" the correct term here? It isn't used in the article.

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Supermancho
I've never heard of the WikiHow site. It's one of a near-infinite number of
engrish permutations that is never ranked in any of my searches or my parents'
or my wife's. For a moment, I suspected I was missing out on something...nope.

