Honest/Fishy/Shrewd/Deceptive

I just happen to come across wikihow today. Since its community driven website I wanted to see what is it game plan ( does it pay to contributors/authors or its just another non-profit wikipedia style).

So far what I see is its for-profit and doesn't share revenue with contributors (great huh!).

If you have few minutes go over Is wikiHow a Non Profit and tell whats your impression.

They have nice write-up for why its not non-profit organization, some of which lot of webmasters will find deceptive/fishy or laughable at times.

Undeniably one of the reasons is that Jack and Josh hope that one day wikiHow will earn a profit which we can re-invest back in wikiHow, pay back our financial contributions, and hopefully more.
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For starters, we donâ€™t ever want to ask for donations from our readers and contributors to keep the site going. Any American who has ever listened to a "pledge drive" on their National Public Radio station knows how annoying that these solicitations can be.
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Second, this structure provides some tax advantages to Josh and Jack. Oddly, if we were a non-profit it would be harder for Jack and Josh to write off donations to wikiHow than it is for us currently.
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I don't get this - anyone?

Third, the paperwork, IRS hassles, and organizational complexity in running a non-profit is more than we care to deal with.
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From the same page

How can the community be protected from a overzealous profit motive by Josh and Jack?

First, we would ask the community to look at our behavior and motivations as evidenced by our actions. We are investing money in, not taking money out of wikiHow. Our advertising could be described as minimalist, with logged-in community members viewing no ads whatsoever. We sold our profitable eHow business to focus on building wikiHow into the best how-to resource in the world. And we're doing this because we enjoy it and believe in the wikiHow mission, and I think that comes through in our contributions here.
However, even conspiracy theorists can be reassured that if we were to somehow turn to the dark side, the wikiHow community has the power to "fork" the site and operate it without us. All the content on this site is licensed under Creative Commons and all the software is licensed under the General Public License. Anyone is free to create a non-profit organization, move all the content and software to another domain and continue building wikiHow without us. So if Josh and Jack don't act with the community's best interests in mind, the community can cut us out of the picture. (We hope you don't, though, because building wikiHow is something we love!)

Do Jack and Josh own wikiHow?

No and yes. No because all the content is Creative Commons licensed meaning that anyone can use and redistribute it for any non-commercial purposes. This is different than almost any other media company where the owners control the copyright and only they are allowed to distribute or use the content. In addition, all the software is open-source and freely licensed under the GPL. Therefore in some ways, wikiHow is owned by everyone in the world. On the other hand, Jack and Josh do own the servers and the domain name. That said, anyone has the power to "fork" wikiHow and move all the content and software to new servers and domain, so in some sense Josh and Jack own almost nothing. Basically, Jack and Josh are the stewards of the wikiHow community - as long as the community believes they are the best stewards possible and act in the interest of the community and the wikiHow mission.
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Honest/Fishy/Shrewd/Deceptive - Rate WikiHow

dshah Well-Known Member

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Honest/Fishy/Shrewd/Deceptive - Rate WikiHow

dshah Well-Known Member

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