A profile of wikiHow, which draws an estimated 125M visitors each month and views its commitment to the principles of the open web as a key differentiator
and on the better internet that we could maybe still have if we wanted it—is just! so! good! https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Cooper Fleishman / @_cooper : “It became one of the most popular sites on the web again — but that wasn't good enough for a man who wanted to teach ‘every single person on the planet’ how to do anything they could imagine.” love this https://twitter.com/... @nicolasnova : “We hope that this button catalyzes the acceleration of the editable web, and helps accelerate society's trend toward building valued common resources.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Nicole Zhu / @nicolelzhu : only wikihow knows my embarrassingly inept true self https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Natalie Escobar / @_natalieescobar : One of my favorite sentences ever published: “If Instagram is a fashion show and a sex party and a million dollars and a cute dog, wikiHow is making a bowl of oatmeal and doing a series of mundane favors.” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Paul Bisceglio / @paulbisceglio : I like to imagine that the wikiHow page for How to Write About Internet Culture is just a bunch of links to @kait_tiffany stories + illustrations of people happily reading them. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Kaitlyn Tiffany / @kait_tiffany : i love wikiHow because it is extremely funny but also because it's an underobserved model of an ethical web business! https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Jack Herrick / @jackh : Today's @TheAtlantic article is one of the best descriptions of what makes @wikiHow so weird, so wonderful, so useful, while being such an oddball in Silicon Valley. https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Rachel Wilkerson Miller / @the_rewm : I've been yelling for a while about how WikiHow is deeply underrated/doing the best consistent service journalism on the web right now, so I was delighted to see this @kait_tiffany piece about it https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Pankaj Sachdeva / @sachdeva_pankaj : Every day, millions of people turn to wikiHow for advice on kissing and cleaning and melting cheese, writes @kait_tiffany. What would it be like if the rest of the internet were this useful? https://www.theatlantic.com/ ... Jason Fagone / @jfagone : “It may be the largest commercial platform in existence that hasn't been accused of exploiting its users... ‘The web could be a totally different place.’” https://www.theatlantic.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
This profile lands in a stretch of coverage mourning what the commercial web has lost. A tribute to Wikipedia framed it as one of the last places retaining the early web's utopian glow, and a viral account like @depthsofwikipedia showed audiences still hunger for that material. wikiHow is the other big survivor of that era: an estimated 125 million visitors a month, run by founder Jack Herrick on an explicitly open-web ethos — teaching 'every single person on the planet' how to do anything.
First-order effects
- At 125 million monthly visitors, wikiHow demonstrates that an openly editable, non-algorithmic how-to site can still command top-tier traffic without the engagement-maximizing mechanics that trap users in low-quality feeds.
Second-order effects
- Open commons at this scale become extraction targets: Wikimedia's move to charge companies like Google for premium access via Wikimedia Enterprise while keeping a free tier sketches the monetization path wikiHow will face if search engines and AI firms consume its instructions wholesale.
Third-order effects
- If commons-style sites keep outlasting feed-driven rivals, the durable layer of the web consolidates around openly licensed references whose longevity depends on preservation efforts like those fighting link rot — infrastructure maintained as a public good rather than an ad inventory.
The trend: Commons-based, openly editable reference sites are emerging as the web's durable infrastructure even as commercial platforms optimize toward algorithmic feeds and AI extraction.