As a follow up to my practicum I went to the eHow Wikipedia page to add my own two cents.
What I found when I got there was a much shorter than expected Wikipedia entry. The introduction told about eHow and how its content is created an added to the site using freelance writers who are paid per article written. The other two subpages were the history of eHow and criticisms. eHow started in March of 1999 and has seen countless new owners. Continually sold and resold because in the past the site constantly lost money, eHow is finally run by a few owners and programmers to help keep costs down. The only place I saw fit on this page to add my own thoughts as part of my practicum was in the criticism section. Most of the criticism involve calling eHow a content mill meaning they pay low price for low quality information as much as possible to create as many pages that turn up more often in search engines. In recent years search engines have changed their algorithms to combat this idea of content milling. I wrote in this section "eHow can be seen as an information consuming site by its users. Users do not provide articles, let alone very little feedback, to the site and thus users cannot directly affect the type of content that is seen on eHow. Compared to more user driven sites such as Wikipedia, eHow's user community tend to be more lurkers than contributors." This was my conclusion to my practicum project.
