Tom Viren is the kind of guy who knows how to do lots of things, be it building a deck, writing a web publishing template or rigging a septic system out of 55-gallon plastic drums.
But until recently, the retired Los Angeles-area lifeguard largely toiled in obscurity, dutifully recording photos of his projects for personal reference.
After stumbling across a site called wikiHow early in the year, however, Viren began publishing his home improvement tips online. In the past several months, he has compiled more than a dozen articles for the site (which collects how-to instructions) on topics ranging from aligning a photo to digging out a basement.
"It's a little bit of an ego thing," said Viren, who's pleased to see that his author's page on the wikiHow site comes up first when he searches Google for his name. Mostly, however, he finds it rewarding to share his knowledge with other people who might find it useful.
Contributors like Viren will play a critical role in determining the success of wikiHow, a four-month-old website applying the wiki model of information collection -- in which anyone can be a contributing writer or editor -- to a new arena.
Currently, a single project, the open-source encyclopedia Wikipedia, dominates the wiki genre. Launched in 2001, the site now boasts close to 1.5 million entries and contains reference articles in 92 languages. Other public wikis are out there, like travel guide World66 and a few sites serving open-source programmers, but nothing of a comparable magnitude.
While he's not counting on creating the next Wikipedia, wikiHow's founder, San Francisco Bay Area entrepreneur Josh Hannah, believes the how-to genre is a good fit for the wiki model.
"Everybody knows how to do at least a handful of things really well," Hannah said. "And there really hasn't been a great channel for people to create lasting, useful documents."
Hannah launched the wiki in February as an extension of eHow.com, another website that he bought last year. EHow had once been a promising internet startup, but the site fell into disrepair following the collapse of the dot-com bubble four years ago. Its database contains close to 100,000 pages of assorted how-to instructions, but without regular updating, entries were looking stale.
By launching a volunteer-supported site for how-to directions, Hannah saw a way out of the staleness problem. Because anyone can edit or add information on a wiki, an active group of volunteers ought to ensure that postings are up-to-date.
Of course, creating a reference work based on contributions from the public has its own set of challenges. First off, there's more than one way to do almost everything. Hannah said he plans to publish multiple how-to approaches on topics like, say, mixing a martini or attracting members of the opposite sex, one of the most popular categories on the site.
Staying on the right side of the law is also a concern. The site won't publish instructions for doing things like building a fertilizer bomb or cooking up designer drugs. Already, Hannah said, he's had to delete some "blatantly inappropriate" articles dealing with firearms.
Besides keeping out the unwanted submissions, the site will have to devote substantial effort to motivating volunteers, speculated Marshall Brain, founder of the explanatory site HowStuffWorks, who has considered launching a wiki forum.
"If real estate is location, location, location, then wiki would be community, community, community," Brain said. Without a sizeable group of enthusiastic writers and editors willing to devote their time to the project, a public wiki project won't succeed.
Hannah estimates that wikiHow currently has a few hundred regular writers. The site supports itself through AdSense, a Google service that matches ads to keywords on publishers' websites.
Currently, Hannah says, the site is a "big money loser," though he'd like to generate enough money from advertising to cover the costs of running the site. It's a difficult balance, though, because contributors would likely be turned off if the site contained a large number of ads.
But Hannah takes some comfort in his observation that a lot of people search online for how-to instructions, and not many sites cater to their whims.
"If you want to find content on sports on the internet, there are a lot of sites," he said. "But if you want to learn how to throw a knuckle ball, you could search ESPN all day and not be able to find it."
