How To Make a WikiHow

WikiHow is littered with thousands of articles created with the intention of teaching readers how to do something. These WikiHow articles can range from "How To Make Chocolate Chip Cookies," to "How To Trust Yourself." With the right amount of research and effort put into a topic, almost anyone can publish their own WikiHow article. While anyone can create a WikiHow user and start writing articles, there are certain guidelines that are enforced by pretty strict admins. After trying to create a WikiHow page for a class project, it definitely looks easier than it actually is. Before you can even think about writing a WikiHow, a topic must be chosen. While this sounds simple enough, the topic had to be something that was not already written about on WikiHow. Of course, almost everything imaginable has been written on WikiHow. This forces aspiring publishers to get creative and think outside of the box. After being sure it was not already done, the topic of choice ended up being, "How To Get Out of a Reading Slump." This topic was not quite as objective as say a recipe topic. The topic did not necessarily require a step by step tutorial. Being a reader, a reading slump can hit you multiple times. To research this topic there was a big draw from personal experience. After deciding on which methods to include on WikiHow, came the actual writing. With each method presented, there had to be more of a description given to potential readers of the WikiHow. After drafting the first outline, images to go along with the article had to be thought about. A WikiHow that is about a recipe can just feature pictures or videos to visually show readers to do each step. Images for the topic, "How To Get Out of a Reading Slump," need to be a little more interpretive. For example, if one method was about rereading your favorite books, you might just see a picture of someone reading a book. This made getting the appropriate pictures to fit each method a little difficult. It is harder to know whether or not readers will understand what is trying to be conveyed in the images, and how they relate to the methods. After taking the best photos for the project, they now needed to be edited to properly fit a WikiHow page. The editing and resizing of photos were done on Adobe Photoshop CC 2018. Only after finalizing the outline of the topic, could we start the coding process. The class was directed to use a published WikiHow as a reference to code our articles. The coding process seemed pretty complicated upon first looking at it. However, since we did have an already coded article to copy and paste from, this made the process a lot easier. Once the coding was complete, you can now think about publishing your WikiHow article. While this step should be pretty easy, it can actually be a bit of a pain to achieve. The writing and coding of the article took place on separate platforms such as Google Docs and Microsoft Word. This was done to avoid accidental publishing. After starting an article on the actual WikiHow site, the title of the topic was entered. This is when problems started. After entering the title of the topic, "How To Get Out of a Reading Slump," WikiHow inserted an article very similar to mine in the editing box. It appeared that another WikiHow user was creating an article about how to get out of a reading slump. There was not much to be done about this except erase what was in the edit box and replace it with the article created for the class. Little tweaks had to be made here and there to perfect the layout of the article. With the coding sorted out, the images added, and final approval was the professor, the article was ready to publish. Unfortunately, according to WikiHow admins, the article did not meet the site's criteria to get published. Yes, after completing the entire process to create a WikiHow, the article was still not good enough to get published. While actually publishing the article would have felt like more of an achievement, the overall experience of creating a WikiHow was pretty rewarding. It was really interesting to go through the work put in behind the scenes of creating an article for the WikiHow site. It was also pretty fun to work with photoshop for the first time. While this project could be stressful at times, the experience of it made the project worth it.

Article used to code - https://www.wikihow.com/Make-No-Bake-Cookies?utm_source=wikihow&utm_medium=main_page_carousel&utm_campaign=desktop