Tag: Jack Herrick

Former eHow Owner Impressed With Site’s Direction

Demand Media’s eHow site is no stranger to controversy. It’s often been criticized for saturating the web with content of questionable quality, but the company has heard these complaints loud and clear, and has been making numerous efforts to bring its overall quality up. This has included the deletion of at least 300,000 articles, new feedback tools, and partnerships with various leading voices in their respective fields. Most recently, the company has greatly reduced its number of writing assignments.

We’ve chronicled all of this throughout the past year, and you can view all of our coverage oh eHow here for more background.

We had a conversation with Jack Herrick, who used to run eHow before selling it to Demand Media about the direction the site is going in. We had talked to him in the past about eHow’s strategy vs. wikiHow‘s (Herrick’s current site) – basically the content farm vs. wiki approach and their relationships to content quality. He’s impressed with eHow’s current direction.

“Overall, I’m impressed with eHow’s new focus on quality,’ Herrick tells us. “Web readers win when publishers focus on quality over quantity. And when one of the highest volume publishers on the web turns more attention to quality, web users should crack open the bubbly. The old eHow focused on pleasing the mighty Google overlord. The new eHow is trying to convince consumers to create their own individual magazine on eHow and then share it with their social network. It’s a big shift.”

It’s worth noting that the “Google overlord” has taken a drastically different view of content farm-style content over the past year. That’s not to say that Google didn’t care about quality in the past, but the Panda update introduced this year, has made it more difficult for this type of content to do well in search.

“Just to be clear, wikiHow has always been going a different direction than eHow,” says Herrick. “At wikiHow, we’ve been working on building the world’s best how-to manual from day one. Instead of saturating the web with 3 million articles, we built ‘only’ 123,000 articles over 6 years. And all of our articles are being constantly improved via the magic of wiki editing. Our work is better today than it was 6 months ago and 6 months from now we will be even better.”

“eHow appears to be making 3 big shifts in their content production: They will be producing more videos, more slideshows, and more feature length articles,” he says. “The new prominence of slideshows indicates they are increasingly moving away from their initial focus on ‘how-to’ to a broader magazine-like media site. For example the new eHow site ‘Shift,’ reminds me of a combination of iVillage meets Huffington Post meets Business Insider. Instead of traditional how-tos they are producing click friendly slideshows like this one of “top 100 women on the move”.

“Media like this is much more likely to get shared on social networks than a useful but arguably boring how-to article,” says Herrick. ” An SEO bonus: If Google’s Panda algorithm measures time on site as a quality factor, time consuming media like slideshows and videos may boost overall search visibility for all of ‘old’ eHow.”

I’d add that the more that a piece of content is shared, the better it’s likely to do in search as well.

“eHow has increasingly produced feature articles with over 1,000 words and more research and fact checking than the arguably shallow 350-500 standard articles that make up the vast majority of their how-to library,” says Herrick. “I think these new feature articles are a big improvement. At wikiHow, we have always thought it makes sense to take as many words as necessary to adequately cover the topic. Sometimes we write just a few hundred words to cover a simple topic such as: How to Make a Wi-Fi Booster Using Only a Beer Can or How to Peel a Kiwi.”

“Other times we need thousands of words to cover complex topics like: How to Survive in Federal Prison.”

“It’s good to see eHow finally recognizing that some topics need more depth than 500 words allows,” he says. “The Demand Media guys are smart. I’m sure this shift in strategy is based on a lot of user data. I think it’s going to work well for them.”

“wikiHow on the other hand is sticking to our founding mission,” Herrick notes. “We have the not so humble ambition of building the world’s default how-to manual. We’re going to keep using new technology and our fantastic community of volunteer editors to provide the best how-tos on the web. Our work is far from done.”

October 14, 2011
An Inside Look at wikiHow Content Quality Control

We recently spoke with Jack Herrick, founder of wikiHow, about how wikiHow’s quality differs from a site like eHow, which is often labeled a content farm with suspect quality. Herrick’s insight on this is particularly interesting, given that he used to run eHow, before selling to Demand Media.

Herrick has now shared more information with us about the quality control process at wikiHow. We’ll let you be the judge on how effective it is.

"One of the apparent mysteries of wikis like wikiHow is how they can produce such high quality content while simultaneously allowing anyone at any time to edit almost any page," says Herrick. "You can go to wikiHow or Wikipedia right now, press edit, remove everything and write ‘I like cheese’ and press save and that is what will be published, at least for a short while.

He even invited me to give it a try. So I did, at 10:02am.

"Why doesn’t ‘I like cheese’ stay on the page for days and days? The answer is twofold," he says. "First of all, there is a group of passionate people working hard day in and day out to make sure that every part of wikiHow is the best that it can be. Secondly, the wiki technology provides them with powerful tools, including a system of checks and balances, which helps them ensure that every edit that stays on wikiHow improves its overall quality."

"The wikiHow community thinks of wikiHow as a second home," Herrick tells us. "Within wikiHow they accomplish tasks, organize, clear lists of things to do, and socialize with like minded people. The people who contribute on our site pride themselves deeply in the work they do. It is hard for some people to imagine why people would dedicate so much time and do so much work when they are not being compensated financially. But, it is often financial compensation that muddies people’s motivations to accomplish goals. (See Daniel Pink’s book ‘Drive’ if you are curious to learn more about how money can pollute motivation.) Each individual in our community completes tasks because it satisfies them on a deep personal level. As an analogy, every individual prides himself on something different – like taking great care of their dogs, fine tuning their snowboarding skills, learning to play an instrument, or being artistic. The people on wikiHow pride themselves on building and maintaining the best online how to manual they can. As a result, they take quality very seriously."

"The wiki itself is a busy place, sort of like a busy city, where people are all doing different jobs that make the city function," Herrick continues. "There are tons of activities that people can do, some of which are quite social, all which help the wiki become better. Some examples are: categorizing articles, curating images, selecting videos, expanding articles, clearing out lists of articles that need attention, fact checking, answering how-to requests, writing articles, copyediting, formatting, reviewing edits, etc."

"One of these jobs is wikiHow’s first layer of defense against bad edits," he says. "Typically within an hour of an edit being made, a volunteer wikiHow editor reviews the edit in an app called Recent Changes Patrol. Think of Recent Changes Patrol as a social app that helps volunteer editors review edits made by other contributors."

Herrick says volunteers review edits one at a time, and that they take one of the following four actions:

1. Improve an edit: Editors make quick changes to fix grammar errors or polish obtuse text.

2. Rollback vandalism and nonsense. Open editing attracts a fair amount of ludicrous edits. Fortunately, volunteer editors typically revert such nonsense within minutes. This is where the ‘I like cheese’ edit would get addressed.

3. Mark the edit as patrolled without changing it.

4. Leave a message for the editor asking for further improvements or clarifications, or complimenting them on what a great job they did.

Here is what the Recent Patrol Patrol app looks like:

"In the case of the edit you see here, this edit which smells like link building would almost certainly get rolled back," says Herrick.

"While wikiHow has 300,000 registered users editing on the site, most of them are not active recent changes patrollers," he says. "This is probably a good thing! Typically on any given week less than 50 very dedicated patrollers will do the majority of the work. The power patrollers do a heck of a lot though: the top patrollers will review thousands of edits each week. They get a lot of satisfaction out of the work they do. And, as you can imagine, wikiHow also has a system to patrol the patrollers to make sure they are doing a good job. If not, they will receive coaching."

There are still more layers of quality control. A second layer, he says is a watchlist system that notifies people via email (and on wikiHow) when an article they are following gets changed.

"When a person starts an article, they’re given the option to get notified whenever it gets edited," he explains. "On top of that, anyone can watch any page on wikiHow, whether they wrote it or not. So, when a page gets edited poorly, it’s likely that someone subscribing to watchlist emails will fix the page when they check their inbox."

"A third layer of quality control is a system called accuracy patrol," he says. "Like many websites, we ask our readers to flag articles for accuracy. When we get a certain ratio of reader flags, we place the problem articles on a list for further review and improvement from editors."

While plenty of details here given here, Herrick says all of this explanation really only scratches the surface. "There is some mystery and magic to wikis that is difficult to capture in a brief description," he says.

Do you think the system i working? DuckDuckGo, obviously thinks it works pretty well, considering they’re using wikiHow content as instant answers in their search engines. More on that from DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg here.

By the way, at 11:17, as I’m about to click publish on this story, the page I edited still says, "I like Cheese."

Update at 11:45: It’s now back to normal as of sometime in the last few minutes. Under two hours. Not too bad. It’s hard to say with any certainty that this article didn’t play a role, however.

February 18, 2011
wikiHow On Why Wikis Deliver Higher Quality Than Content Farms

Jack Herrick is the founder of wikiHow. He used to run eHow, the content farm dominating many of Google’s search results, before selling it to Demand Media, which has boosted it to its current state. Alternative search engine DuckDuckGo just started hard wiring wikiHow results as the top result for many how-to queries. This prompted us to delve into just what sets a site like wikiHow apart from a site like eHow in terms of quality. In other words, why give wikiHow special treatment while eHow’s content is being banned by other search engines (Blekko)?

Herrick made his case to WebProNews. We’d love to hear whether you agree or disagree with his take in the comments.

"Without calling out any specific company, there are several things that set wikiHow apart from most other how-to sites on the web," Herrick tells us. "wikiHow is a wiki, like Wikipedia, and is always open for editing. Open wiki editing enables mediocre content to improve as experts or passionate hobbyists are able to share their knowledge on the subject. The wiki method works to improve quality slowly but steadily as articles evolve."

"Most other how-to sites are written by people paid a few dollars to write an article," he says. "A few dollars per article can fund a very readable but brief and arguably shallow overview of a topic. In contrast, wikiHow editors bring the passion that only a volunteer can bring. After many editors have worked on one of our articles, they become significantly longer, and more detailed than articles on most how-to sites. The resulting product can thus look very different."

"Since our founding, the vision here has always been to make each page the best possible resource on the web, slowly over time," say Herrick. "I’ve never accepted venture capital investment, so I don’t have to sacrifice quality for short term financial rewards. We have a long term mission that I’m willing to patiently take decades to achieve."

We asked Herrick how eHow is run differently from when he was running it.

"When I ran eHow, we did a similar business model to what eHow does now," he explains. "The major difference was scale. When I sold eHow to Demand Media we had only 17,000 articles. The current eHow team has done an impressive job at scaling the model to millions of articles."

"I decided to sell eHow, because after I started wikiHow (initially as a side project within eHow), I saw that the wiki method delivered higher quality content," he tells us. "So I decided to focus on wikiHow, because I concluded it would be more likely to obtain my long term vision of building a high quality how-to manual."

When asked about the editing process at wikiHow, Herrick says, "To tell you the truth, most articles on wikiHow start out as mediocre quality articles wiki editors call ‘stubs’."

"These stubs are often of the same shallow quality found on other how-to sites," he explains. "The wiki magic begins though when other editors begin collaborating on the articles. Over time these stub articles can blossom. Our mission at wikiHow is to build the single highest quality resource on the internet for each how-to topic we cover. On some articles we achieve our quality goals quickly, in other cases it takes several years, and in other cases we are still waiting for it to happen. But every day wikiHow receives thousands of edits, which help improve our overall quality."

"Each edit on wikiHow is reviewed by a human (not a bot) volunteer editor, typically within minutes of the edit being made," says Herrick. "Our volunteer ‘recent changes patrollers’ are quite effective at quickly deleting vandalism and nonsense edits, while formatting good information to help our articles improve. We have additional layers of quality control as well. Almost all of them are manned by volunteer editors, whose sole motivation is marinating a high quality information resource."

One of the big issues with content farm articles performing so well in search is that they often appear over the real expert stuff – a case we made using a brain cancer example in a previous article. We asked Herrick whether wikiHow content should be surfaced for how-tos over results from experts in any given field.

"When wikiHow works best, our articles actually are started or edited by true experts in the field," he says. "That is the magic of wikis actually. Many ‘experts’ don’t maintain blogs and spend hours writing detailed posts. But they might stumble on a wikiHow or Wikipedia article and spend just a few minutes improving it. Open wiki editing enables us to capture the knowledge of thousands of experts, who aren’t otherwise spending their time pumping out blog posts."

In a perfect world, this would be a great concept.

"I’m not saying this works in all cases," he adds. "Plenty of wikiHow articles haven’t found that expert yet. But plenty have."

He shared some examples where he says he knows the personal background of the authors or editors. These include an article on how to brew commercial beer, one on how to make an Orca from a plastic straw, one on how to operate a mini excavator, and one on how to buy a private island. These feature contributions from a brewer, one of Japan’s leading straw artists, someone who actually drives a mini excavator, and someone who sells private islands for a living, respectively.

"Again I’m not saying all articles are written or edited by experts," he says. "Sometimes it takes a lonnnng time for the wiki magic to happen."

"BTW, another value of an expert writing on wikiHow as opposed to their own blog is that we don’t let them write commercial pitches into our articles," he notes. "Often blog posts by commercial providers are really just teasers with a sales pitch ‘eg if you really want to fix your hard drive…send it into our data recovery firm at example.com!’. The wiki editing method weeds out those sort of commercial pitches."

That certainly is one plus.

February 7, 2011