So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual? | Hacker News Reader

So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual?

scripting.com

11 pointsdavewiner16 comments

"Hi, where can I buy just enough rope to hang myself"?

For some things, simple instructions are fine - the coffee example being one of them. Once you get into complex or dangerous things (home improvement, etc.) you need to impart some safety and theory before just giving instructions.

There's a reason that they make undergrads go through the "Lab Safety" course before doing work in a science lab...

Before reading the article, I thought it was going to be about a universal manual for web browsers.

Such a thing would be immensely helpful.

Say, for instance, that your site asks the user to disable their popup blocker, or install a bookmarklet, or upgrade to a newer version of IE. It would be great if everyone could just use a "how do I do this?" link that goes to a neutral site with instructions. Sort of like whatbrowser.org, but with info on how to actually do stuff.

One scoop per cup is the golden rule. ;)

http://www.wikihow.com

Yes, wikiHow is it. From wikiHow's about us page, http://www.wikihow.com/wikiHow:About-wikiHow:

"wikiHow is a collaborative effort to build and share the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Like Wikipedia, wikiHow is a wiki, in that anyone can write or edit a page on the site. Thousands of people from all over the world have collaboratively written 93,410 how-to articles. Over 25 million people a month read wikiHow, which makes it the 150th most popular website according to Quantcast."

The web itself is a user manual. And the index/catalog is called a search engine.

It's not open, but eHow.com is pretty much a general FAQ for the web.

PLEASE NO.

eHow is Demand Media. It's a spam/scam - they generate millions of pages with almost zero content. Contributors are paid pennies to write the bare minimum to get a "PASS." Demand Media is a disease of the web.

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/digital-strategies/e-media-ti...

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/demand_media_is_a_page_...

http://www.complaintsboard.com/complaints/ehowcom-demand-med...

Who would read it?

Does anyone read user manuals any more?

"Kick to restart"

It's down- mirror?

Looks like it's back up. Worked for me * shrug *

If not:

>I was just making a small pot of coffee, just two cups. So I measured out two full cups of water, and guessed how much coffee to put in the basket. The coffee came out great, but could just have easily come out awful.

>So if Wikipedia is the web's encyclopedia, where is the web's user's manual? It would be infinitely expandable, aspire to cover everything, and take a practical 1-2-3 approach to doing things we humans do on this planet in the times we live in.

and try googling for "cache:url" in the future :)

Awesome, thanks for the tip! I searched for the url but the results didn't have "Cached" links below them, this is so much faster (and clearly more effective).

The cached-links seem intermittent at best, cache: finds a lot that aren't linked. Searching also takes you straight to it, which is nice.

I only found out about that trick ~ a month ago, from here. It has quickly become my favorite / most-useful Google trick ever.

  !cache url

If duckduckgo is your bag.

wikihow

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