WikiHow, a wiki-based community consisting of how-to guides, has launched a Hindi language version of the portal at hi.wikihow.com.
The website is already available in other International languages such as English, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew.
Portal: The Hindi website offers the same UI(user interface) and features as its other counterparts. Users who already have an account with WikiHow English or other languages can use the same login to access the Hindi portal. At the time of writing this article, it’s social login via Facebook connect was not working.
Users can search or submit articles in categories including arts and entertainment (कला और मनोरंजन), travel (यात्रा), relationships (रिश्ते), among others. Users can also search for articles from the search bar on the navigation menu. However, in order to search, users need to submit query in devanagari script, which might be complicated for users who’ve not installed one. Perhaps the site could have incorporated support for Transliteration. Apart from that, the search bar also misses with feature such as voice search, which is available on the English version of the site. The voice search is also not available on its Spanish, French and other language websites. We believe since the website uses Google’s custom search on the site, it might add this feature once Google provides it for Hindi language.
On the article page, users can edit, discuss, and also check out the history of the page. Users can also share the article with social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, among others. Users interested in communicating with WikiHow for adding a category or for reporting a bug can join their Google Groups page.
We found it strange that WikiHow Hindi makes use of devanagari script even in the URL. The feature lowers the usability of the website as it will require an extra effort from the user to type the URL of a particular page, but we believe this feature might be more useful in non-metro areas where Hindi version of the site will be used the most.
Content: For most part, it seems that WikiHow has converted its existing how-to guides from WikiHow English to Hindi. For example, we checked the most viewed article on WikiHow Hindi’s front page – कॉफ़ी पीने का आनंद लें, the same article is available on its English version. We also noticed that not all articles have been translated to Hindi yet, in fact, categories on the Hindi version of the website are still not complete. We would also like to see more articles in Hindi specifically written for the Indian audience than mere translation of existing content. However, we believe that it will happen once the community grows. We definitely need more useful Indic content to get users in rural or semi-urban markets, on the internet.
WikiHow’s content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike (by-nc-sa) license, which means anyone can modify and re-use the content non-commercially by giving proper attribution to the author.
Monetization: WikiHow monetizes the website by running ads on the website, however, we could not find any display ads on the Hindi version of the website.
Other similar offerings: There are other players such eHow, howtodothings, and video how-to content guides such as Expert Village, however, none of them have a portal with content in Hindi language.
