Jack H

I'm Jack Herrick and I'm the founder of wikiHow. While I may have been one of the first editors here, I'm now one of many who share the goal of building a freely available, how-to manual in many languages. I view myself as the steward of this project on a conditional basis. I have and will continue to do all I can to help wikiHow achieve our shared mission. In the event that the community no longer feels I'm the best steward for this project, the community retains the right to fork the content and software to a new host and continue the mission without me.

Please don't feel like you need my permission to make any changes on wikiHow. I trust you and the collaborative process to do the right thing to improve our how-to manual. Be bold in your editing.

[edit] Contact me

I enjoy meeting wikiHowians from around the world, so please feel free to leave me a talk page message and say hello. Or if this wiki thing confuses you too much leave me an email at [email protected] (mention "Jack" in subject line to get past filters). You can also call me at 650-492-8008, although in most cases email will get a faster reply.

[edit] Some goals for wikiHow

I started wikiHow with the goal that we would one day accomplish our mission of building the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Our long term goal should be to have every article be the single, most accurate, most helpful set of instructions on that topic available anywhere. A freely available, multilingual, and complete how to manual would improve millions of lives in both small and large ways. Indeed it already has. It is an ambitious goal that will take us decades to achieve.

In addition to the pleasure I get from building a great how-to manual, I also take pride in the manner that we build it. Our open editing and community self management challenges old assumptions about how organizations need be built. A successful wiki requires that thousands of strangers assume good faith, collaborate and build trust. It demonstrates that many people want to do something for the common good and will do so if empowered to make changes. It shows that people can self organize productively. And it happens across nationalities, religions, and age groups.

[edit] Some things I do on wikiHow

I spend most of my time on wikiHow working behind the scenes. As wikiHow has grown from a small project to one of the most popular websites on the Internet, the back office time demands have grown exponentially. Quite frequently I'm working with Travis to design new features or just make sure our existing ones are still working. On the site, I enjoy doing new article boost, patrolling recent changes, or thanking wiki editors. While I never seem to find time to write as many new articles as I would like, I have been able to patrol 20,079 edits so far (update this)!