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wikiHow:On Being Happy at wikiHow

Edited by Jack Herrick, Flickety, Lillian May, Jacob

EditOn Community & You

"A community is like a ship; everyone must be prepared to take the helm." ~~Henrik Ibsen





A Community Effort

wikiHow is a team effort, a community. This acknowledges that everyone has their own abilities and everyone has something useful and important to contribute to wikiHow. Being articulate, clever, astute or fast to spot an error are all fine traits to have. Many users are here precisely because they are clever and quick with words. Yet, how you apply these word skills in guiding others on wikiHow matters - a lot. Be helpful and kind, always. The how of being helpful matters the most - there are differing ways to express the same thing but how you say something to another when guiding them matters. Just as you have feelings, dignity and deserve respect, so do those you interact with. How you treat others is how they will treat you; be nice and niceness will return. Where it doesn't, be the stronger person and don't retaliate; eventually that person will learn from their own lack of respect. Leadership comes from encouragement, personal strength and overcoming the need to use criticism to self-assert. Being constructive, kind and caring moves mountains.


An Individual's Self-Respect


Always be kind to yourself and respect your abilities. As a vital part of our wikiHow community, don't neglect your own strengths, don't be too timid to speak up and don't ever feel inferior. Each one of us has differing, valuable and amazing skills and each one of us is the best judge of our own strengths and abilities. Take those strengths and use them to contribute your best in our community, to make things better for wikiHow, for the community and ultimately, for you as a contributor.


Learn Together


Each of us comes to wikiHow with our own experiences of life. None are better than the other, they are just different and yet each is equally important. Share these experiences through adding your knowledge, through interacting with one another and through giving a voice to others who share your experience in the real world but may not be able to bring it to wikiHow as you can. In the process of sharing, learn from one another and grow together. This is about sharing knowledge for everyone and you are a key part of this knowledge revolution.


Nothing is Undoable


Editing Boo Boos - Wikis are for editing and this editing is expected to occur time and time again. wikiHow is no different. So if you make a boo-boo, you can unmake it or you can ask someone else to, or wait for someone else to. There is no need to feel that you have done something wrong provided that your edit was in good faith and with good intentions.


Perfectionism - Never feel that there is a mistake-free contributor on this site. As with the perfect human, a perfect editor simply does not exist. Each of us makes boo-boos and for the main part, each of us learns from these boo-boos.


Moments of despair and frustration - The boo boos also extend to more than just edits. A careless word, an angry moment, a total meltdown - if you leave evidence of these online for all to see, they will certainly be noticed. Most of the time there are understandable reasons for why this happens and others do try to understand. If a heated moment results, the best that you can do is to back down, turn off the computer and take some time out. On your return, acknowledge that things got a little too much for you and seek the community's support. We are all capable of undoing our errors with apologies, kind words and remorse. And it is beholden on the rest of the community to give a person the benefit of the doubt, to let a person overcome adversity and rejoin the community. From both sides is expected civility, respect and support.


Getting on with it - Each of us has the ability to learn from our mistakes and grow. In doing so, we live life to its fullest. As Oscar Wilde said, "experience is simply the name we give our mistakes." Go wiki!

EditOn Respecting Volunteer Effort

Hard at work...



Antoine de St-Exupéry summed it up perfectly when he said that "[t]he thing that matters is the effort." When you have a volunteer community, it is especially important to value people's efforts and enthusiasm. This means respecting efforts and being supportive. This respect is top down and bottom up. So, you can expect the leaders of this community to demonstrate respect towards you and in turn, they can expect it from you. It is horizontal as well as vertical, so you can expect respect from other contributors on the site and they, in turn, can expect it back from you. The majority of us are volunteers on this site and we give our time, effort and ideas from motivations of goodness, good faith, passion for wikiHow's mission and because we like each other and want to be a part of this community. Simple, eh?!

Being a Constructive Critic on wikiHow

There is a difference between constructive criticism and being critical for the sake of being critical and showing off our book smarts. Temper the critic within you and remember to keep your criticism:

  • civil - be polite and respect the work and time of others here.
  • considerate - don't talk around an author, editor or patroller you have an issue with - always be good enough to assume good faith and raise issues directly with that person. Gathering a little cohort of supporters for your side of the story and then blowing an issue open on a forum thread or a discussion page is an enormous no-no.
  • constructive - listen to the other point of view, be considerate of the perspectives involved and don't be so relentless that your point ends up being the only point the criticism is continuing.

Teddy Roosevelt is an example of a person who didn't sit down and put up with what life threw at him. He stood up, walked, traversed raging rivers and threw back at life its vicissitudes, no matter what. Okay, so sometimes he went a bit too far but all the same, he had a spirit for life and respecting work that is hard to ignore. On 6th January 1916, he lectured an audience and the world has ever since being left with this famous summation of the quiet achiever:

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."




The long and the short is that it is important to acknowledge the importance of every contributor on wikiHow. Support and encourage the choices made by volunteers to undertake roles, projects and activities that best reflect his or her interests and abilities. Simply put:

  • Respect the good faith choices each contributor makes here
  • Respect the time, effort and consideration of one another
  • Support and encourage one another in the choices you make; and
  • Thank one another

NB This page was ported from User:Flickety

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Categories: WikiHow Essays | WikiHow User's Manual

Recent edits by: Lillian May, Flickety, Jack Herrick

Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 257 times.