In a 2015 presentation at LDV Vision Summit, Thom Scher, who, according to LinkedIn, worked at wikiHow for four years and rose from a project manager to “Senior Director Marketing & Visual Content,” describes wikiHow’s visual content strategy.

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Scher says in the presentation that, “about four years” previous to the May 2015 keynote, wikiHow’s graphics were mostly a motley assortment of user-created art and pictures sourced from Flickr. Around that time, he continues, wikiHow “started an initiative to start producing this visual content ourselves.”

The shift in strategy came the same year that Google released “Google Panda,” a major change to its search ranking algorithm, which an O’Reilly Media report describes as being released in response “to the rise of low quality ‘content farms.’”

One slide showing the “early days of the wikiVisual project” illustrates the evolution of a wikiHow post about how to cook macaroni and cheese. Scher comments that it once featured a “really bad illustration of blocks of yellow being put in water.”

Image: LDV Vision Summit

“Here’s the thing though, it still led to an increase to traffic on the page,” Scher said, referring to the clip-art style graphic. “We were being rewarded for adding images, regardless of whether or not the images were crappy.”

Scher notes during his talk that, in certain cases, wikiHow opted to commission original photography or create videos as opposed to drawings, as these often tested better for metrics like engagement, “helpfulness,” and “authority.” Regardless, the company leaned into making illustrations en masse in 2011.

“It was so worth the cost, we did it at scale. Over four years we ended up doing 1.4 million custom visuals, and those are live on over 150,000 of our articles. That’s a lot, and it’s taken a lot of manpower to make it happen, and we’re constantly trying to move the needle even further on that visual content.”

“This project kind of started as, frankly, something completely experimental in 2011,” Hadley told me. “We just wanted to see if we could find people to help us create custom images for our articles.”

Hadley said the secrecy around wikiHow art exists partly because the system worked so well. “It was new, but we felt like we had something that was really special, so we kind of asked people to keep it a bit of a mystery,” he said. “And, over the years, kind of maintaining the enigma has been part of the fun… that mystery has been a part of why this stuff has gained traction.”

Still, traces of the operation can be found online. Dozens of professional profiles on sites like LinkedIn and Behance mention freelance illustration for wikiHow. The vast majority list locations in the Philippines, with others based in countries including Argentina, Romania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Turkey, India, Indonesia, and New Zealand. A search of the Philippines-specific job portal onlinejobs.ph with a “Pro” account turned up a dozen more profiles who listed past freelance illustration experience at the site.

Two Philippines-based illustrators attached specific examples of art they created for wikiHow guides to their profiles or websites. Their work is currently featured on multiple live wikiHow articles. One of the artists noted that she’d “illustrated 3000+ articles” over a span of more than four years. Eight artists based in the Philippines, and one in the U.S., confirmed to OneZero that they’d created art on a freelance basis at some point for wikiHow.

LinkedIn profiles of wikiHow’s in-house team also indicate a worldwide illustration operation. Daisy Chung, wikiHow’s current creative director, lists one of her responsibilities as “provid[ing] creative direction to a large global team of illustrators.” Brooke Matthews, who, according to her LinkedIn, worked at wikiHow from 2012 to 2017, first as a “Project Manager of Visual Content” and eventually “Director of Visual Content,” notes that she “led the creation of over 2.5+ million custom digital media assets,” “traveled globally to meet with content producers and hold artist workshops,” as well as “mentored two in-house visual team project managers.”

“The artists on wikiHow really are people all over the globe,” said Hadley. “Probably the only place you won’t find some sort of wikiHow artist is in Antarctica.”

Contracts with nondisclosure agreements could potentially be to blame for how few artists mention working for wikiHow publicly relative to the site’s humongous volume of illustration work. For instance, one self-employed illustrator listed their work experience as “2 years as illustrator in WikiHow” on one online professional profile, but, on another, only said they’d been “hired in NDA contract with certain company as illustrator” for two years and 10 months. When contacted by OneZero, this artist confirmed she’d signed an “NDA form (non disclosure agreement),” and asked which website listed the information so she could take it down.

The eight Philippines-based artists OneZero interviewed said they found out about the wikiHow opportunity in a variety of ways. One former freelancer told me she’d started drawing for wikiHow after a “guy randomly went to my university and start[ed] asking around who’s good at drawing.” Another said he was referred to a hiring manager by a friend. Several more said that they found work at wikiHow via third-party companies, either by finding their listings on sites like Upwork and Indeed, or by being contacted by representatives from these groups.

A company named “ArtLab Branding Solutions,” which appears to be based in Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines, is one of these middlemen. When reached for comment, the company’s CEO Freddie Ray Cornella confirmed that wikiHow was a client.

“We do bulk illustrations for them,” Cornella said in a Facebook message, adding that ArtLab is able to create hundreds of unique images per day, “even up to a thousand if the contract is long term.” He provided a document showing the kind of art the company creates, adding that, “Wiki illustrations are just very basic.”

When asked about the specifics of his business, Cornella declined to provide details, saying the information was “confidential.” OneZero found details of ArtLab’s operation online. An onlinejobs.ph profile of one Philippines-based IT specialist lists that, in 2017, he’d been “working with for WikiHow for 3 years with ArtLab Branding Solutions as the middle man.” An Upwork profile of an artist working near Cagayan de Oro notes that he spent 2015 “simplifying instructions doing article illustrations for WikiHow under Artlab Branding Solutions.” Another graphic designer’s onlinejobs.ph profile simply stated that he’d “done quite a bit of articles for Wikihow from our Company Cornella Design Agency” in 2014.

Cornella did offer an estimate of how many illustrations his company had provided to wikiHow in one word: “countless.”

Hadley said wikiHow “recruited initially through a variety of online platforms” but that most artists were now found via freelancers referring friends and classmates.

Once sourced, artists are required to complete a simple application exercise. “There’s a sample article where you have to do sample illustrations as a test,” a Manila-based illustrator who recently started freelancing for the company told me. OneZero found an apparent example of this application from a different artist, a series of six sketches on a Behance account titled “Old Drawing Demo for HowTo / WikiHow Job Application.”

The current freelancer described an online platform where artists can choose a list of available articles that need illustrations. When the art is complete, he said, you simply email the art in a .zip file, and revisions come back via email. Hadley confirmed that wikiHow has “some internal CMS tools that allow people to reserve articles and submit them and get feedback,” and said that Chung oversees a team of three full-time project managers who focus on video and still images.