WikiHow’s art is made by a network of freelancers, mostly in the Philippines

[usrusr]

> wikiHow instructed these freelancers on how “to create the most instructive visuals for every step of every article.”

Hopefully written and illustrated in genuine wikihow style

[beamatronic]

Talk about dogfooding!

[musicale]

Wikihow is gold mine of often hilariously bizarre tracings of stock or staged photos.

What surprises me is that there is no Wikihow filter for photoshop and instagram. So consider this my free gift to any enterprising HN reader who wants to make a small fortune with a wikihowification mobile app.

[deerIRL]

https://outline.com/wMXGZf

[zadkey]

On a tangential note, there is r/disneyvacation/ that pokes fun aty the bad drawings on wikihow and recaptions them.

[jordigh]

Not tangential: it is mentioned and linked in the article.

[orthoxerox]

There's also /r/notdisneyvacation, for image-caption combos that can't be made more bizarre if you try.

[ryanmercer]

"WikiHow Image Macros" on Facebook does similar and is a constant source of entertainment for me and a few friends.

[tobenortobe]

I have noticed this long ago when they put frozen tongue instructions[0], yet still i find instructions quite informative

[0]https://m.wikihow.com/Remove-a-Stuck-Tongue-from-a-Frozen-Su...

[jpalomaki]

Lot’s of images, similar style, creative commons license.

This sounds like an interesting dataset for fun project to generate images based on descriptions.

[greatgib]

Thank you very much OP for the clear title that save me a lot of time not wasted figuring out the reply to the clickbait title of the original article. If only the guys that are posting New York times articles and co could do the same...

[mellosouls]

Getting to the bottom of one of the internet’s most ridiculously drawn mysteries

Seems like quite a snotty article tbh.

WikiHow's art has always reminded me of "How it Works" style children's books, it seems functional and clearly has made an impression in some quarters.

By all means shed some light on it if that's interesting; I don't see the need for the condescending attitude though.

[wyclif]

That illustration for "how to protect yourself from dogs while walking" doesn't appear on the current WikiHow entry. Did someone edit the entry and remove it or add different art?

[scohesc]

Man, what is that headline font?

[at-fates-hands]

Its onezero-yellix-alt

From the Type Foundry from whence it came:

Yellix is a mono-linear geometrical sans-serif font family. It was designed in the time I fell in love with Paul Renner’s first sketch of Futura and I also explored stylistic sets, so I added a lot of strict and cold alternatives (“a, g, m, n, r, t, etc.”). I enjoyed having the possibility to create tensions between circular and square shapes. You will also find less geometrically based alternatives. Yellix has horizontal or vertical terminals and the circle forms are punched into the stems.

More here if you're interested: https://displaay.net/typeface/yellix/

[jaynetics]

It's hilarious. I've just learned a bit of Cyrillic during holidays, and even I can hardly stop reading it as "OpeZego" and so on. It must be almost unreadable for people from the many countries with a Cyrillic alphabet.

[oefrha]

We need a “Getting to the bottom of one of the internet’s most ridiculously designed title fonts.”

[beamatronic]

This is the perfect opportunity for a new wikiHow article!

[neonate]

http://archive.md/Aqd4f

[blep-arsh]

Huh, does Medium just respond 404 when you try to visit it in incognito mode?

[paulpauper]

wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense

[drewbug01]

> wikihow is a cancer on the internet, clogging google and google image results with inane how-to guides .for the purpose of generating ad revenue. It is not just that the guides are bad but they are engaging in keyword spamming by creating guides for things that don't even make sense

[citation needed]

But, seriously - you're alleging that they're a content farm. Can you substantiate that at all? Because from where I sit - as a former employee - I can attest that people working there genuinely believe in their mission to "teach anyone how to do anything." Moreover: it's a wiki! You can edit it! They have a thriving community of editors (not paid editors: community editors!) who work on the site, and frankly I don't think that describes content farms.

Calling wikiHow a cancer on the internet is just a huge overreach - there are actual content farms out there doing what you allege. wikiHow isn't one of them. It's absolutely fair to criticize the quality of the articles if you wish - but again; it's a wiki. Feel free to get involved if you don't like the quality.

[frenchyatwork]

Web search is hard, and Google's results aren't stellar. News at 11. Why do you think we're on HN?

In terms of cancer, wikihow is pretty benign. I rarely use Google these days, but when I did, having results full of sites that use worse dark patterns like pintrest & quora & linked-in links was pretty common place.

[oefrha]

Please don’t editorialize titles, four out of five times the editorialized title is strictly worse, and often it’s straight up wrong, like in this case. If you don’t like the original title due to omission of info, you can at least use the HTML title:

> wikiHow’s art is made by a global network of freelancers, primarily in the Philippines.

(Emphasis mine.)

[dang]

The HTML doc title is "wikiHow’s Art Is Made By a Global Network of Freelancers, Primarily in the Philippines". That's too long to fit HN's 80 char limit, so it looks like the submitter made a good-faith attempt at shortening it, and an inaccuracy crept in that way—quite a minor inaccuracy. The submitted title ("WikiHow's art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines") was still far better than the sensational dross of the page heading.

HTML doc titles are a legit choice for "original title" in the HN guidelines' sense. In fact, they often say more directly what the article is about when the loudest title on a page is linkbait. That's exactly the case here, so I think the misleadingness of the submitted title ("WikiHow's art is created by an army of freelancers in the Philippines") was simply a casualty of HN's 80-char limit. That's pretty rare btw.

I've taken a crack at shortening it in a more accurate way.

[colmvp]

OP's headline saves you a click, versus the original title: "We Finally Figured Out Who Makes wikiHow’s Bizarre Art"

[bryanrasmussen]

suggested title is 8 characters too long for submission.

on edit: changed original to suggested as being clearer.

[flanbiscuit]

Blocked reading the article because medium wants me to sign in.

Is Medium now forcing people to create accounts to read posts or is it just a setting that this subdomain turned on?

[dang]

Please don't post like this. It's off topic and such threads are always the same. And users usually post workarounds in the thread, as they did in this one.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

[puranjay]

Medium is quickly going down the Quora path for me. The content quality is becoming poorer as more and more people use it as a place to dump their zero-traffic blog posts.

The aggressive content gating and pop-ups are another Quora-esque introduction.

Just a case of being blinded by metrics. Adding an aggressive sign-up form might get you more emails and sign-ups, but it will also annoy away better quality users.

[derefr]

Weirdly enough, I think it only does it if it knows you’ve been logged into Medium on your device before, but are currently logged out.

Probably because “analytics engineering reasons”—i.e. it wants to correlate the view with some account’s clickstream, and it really looks like that account should be yours, but it also knows that it’s been a while and so it might now be a guest, and so has logged you out temporarily. But it doesn’t just want to spawn a new temporary clickstream that they’ll have to re-correlate to your account later, because that’s costly to server resources in the O(N) case, and in 90% of cases, it still is you browsing.

[dmos62]

It didn't ask me to sign in, probably because of ublock origin, but none of the pictures loaded. Crappy platform.

[reportgunner]

Here's an outline link, also works in private tab for me.

https://outline.com/wMXGZf

[jonas21]

At least for me, there's an "X" in the upper-right corner that dismisses the popup. I can also click anywhere outside the popup to dismiss it. Is that not the case for you?

https://i.imgur.com/B7WFCcS.png

[the_duke]

Blocking Javascript is what makes Medium usable for me. (eg with uMatrix)

No article limits, no sign in dialogs.

[sleavey]

It didn't block me, and I don't have a Medium account. Firefox 72 on Linux, ublock origin, Germany.

[Cthulhu_]

I've been told it's content creators that enable monetization, but I'm not convinced.

Their loss.

[j45]

I usually click on the X in the top right of the pop-over. Do others not see this/

[tsieling]

Press esc and wave that block away. For now, at least.

[tenryuu]

Wasn't blocked.

Firefox 68,Mobile, ublock origin

[commoner]

The Bypass Paywalls extension allows you to get around the sign in requirement on Medium:

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome

[ravenstine]

Why is it always Medium that's blamed for this but not mainstream news websites? I'm pretty sure I've been paywalled by sites like NYT yet people keep posting links to them.

[peterwwillis]

"To keep reading this story, create a free account."

This is actually great. I won't create an account, so I've spent a lot less time reading empty posts on Medium and more time just going about my day.

[andai]

ctrl+shift+n

[bluntfang]

is "army" the correct term here? It isn't used in the article.

[Supermancho]

I've never heard of the WikiHow site. It's one of a near-infinite number of engrish permutations that is never ranked in any of my searches or my parents' or my wife's. For a moment, I suspected I was missing out on something...nope.