wikiHow:Powered and Inspired by MediaWiki

MediaWiki, the open source software created by the Wikimedia Foundation, powers wikiHow. It is available for free under the GNU General Public License. If you are interested in receiving a copy of our software and all extensions, see below for the download link.

In addition, the idea for wikiHow was inspired by Wikipedia, a free-content encyclopedia built on the same wiki software platform. Wikipedia is a free resource that benefits the whole world. We feel indebted to the Wikipedians for inspiring us and showing us how magnificent a wiki can be. We hope that wikiHow can provide accurate and clear "How To" instructions, much as Wikipedia provides free encyclopedic information.

Welcome Wikipedians!

Welcome to wikiHow! If you are a Wikipedian, you will feel, more or less, at home at wikiHow. As you spend more time here, you will probably notice some things that this community does differently, but while you are learning the wikiHow way you should feel free to be bold in your editing. Eventually you will feel comfortable in both communities.

As you are editing a page on wikiHow, you can press Advanced Editing in the upper left on the editing screen to get the familiar Wikipedia style page editing.

Here are some links that will be helpful in getting integrated with the wikiHow community:

• Contribute to wikiHow - Some basic instructions on contributing here.
• Community Portal
• The forums - Similar to the Village Pump.
• The wikiHow Tour - A guided presentation on how wikiHow works.

MediaWiki Extensions

wikiHow runs a somewhat modified version of MediaWiki. Many of the changes made to the software by Travis are freely available as extensions. It is our goal to both create extensions that help wikiHow users along in their quest to make wikiHow the best how-to manual in the world and to give these modifications back to the open source community. While not all of our features have been extracted into readily usable extensions, we aim to eventually release all of our hacks and features through MediaWiki extensions or some sort of documentation. Because some features are so interdependent, it is difficult to release them as individual features on their own. Some of the extensions that we have released are currently available at MediaWiki.org:

• ImportFreeImages - which allows users to search for photos from Flickr and upload them in one click to the wiki.
• Postcomment - which provides a short form that allows users to post new messages to the ends of discussion pages.
• SpamDiffTool - which allows administrators and editors to add URLs from diff pages to the Spam Blacklist with one click.

A complete list of our extensions is available at wikiHow's version page.

Receiving our Source Code

wikiHow offers the Right to Fork. We thus provide free copies of our source code. You can download it by clicking here.

Please note that while we will happily give you all our source code, we are unable to provide any support for this software. With a very small engineering team, we simply don't have the resources to help anyone else install and use this software. We are sorry about this. Our MediaWiki installation is a constantly changing mix or undocumented hacks and we do not recommend any other project adopt this code lock, stock and barrel. Instead, we recommend using the standard stable and supported versions of MediaWiki which can be downloaded from MediaWiki.org.