Over the last few months, the public perception of the media has shifted, the public trust in the news has reached an all time low, but one venerable bastion of journalism has managed to remain completely free from suspicion or criticism: WikiHow – until now, that is.
If you’re unfamiliar with WikiHow (which is weird, because it’s the single most important journalistic body in the world), it’s essentially an Idiot’s Guide to, well, everything. Very bloody close to everything.
Here are some examples:
You get the idea. Pretty important stuff.
WikiHow has built a mighty empire out of a unique combination of very weird, very specific instruction guides and extremely odd digitally-traced line art, the latter of which they recently came under fire for, when punters noticed they had taken a photo of Barack Obama, Jay Z and Beyoncé, and coloured them all white. Awkward.
Wikihow turned Obama, Beyoncé, and Jay Z white to explain “How to become a congressman.” pic.twitter.com/QNTGz5wjaq
— FORMATION (@beyupdates_) January 22, 2017
After getting relentlessly dragged over what was either weird racism, a terrible judgment call or incompetence, WikiHow apologised today for what turned to be the latter of the three.
1/ When we saw the whitewashed image of Obama, Jay Z & Beyoncé, we were disgusted & ashamed. It never should have been on wikiHow. https://t.co/tCIgpPpD2R
— wikiHow (@wikiHow) January 24, 2017
As they explained in a 7-tweet-long thread on Twitter and also to ‘The Guardian‘, the illustrators responsible worked as a team, with the person who colourised the image receiving simply a black and white sketch:
“One person sketches, the other person colors. The sketcher sent the colorist a black and white sketch. The colorist did not know the race of the models [and] wasn’t aware it was Obama and Beyoncé. We don’t think the illustrator intentionally whitewashed here.“This doesn’t excuse the fact that we hosted a terrible image on wikiHow and we needed more diversity on that article, period. We’re talking with our illustrators to prevent recurrence and encourage diversity. Especially in positions of power.”
WikiHow founder Jack Herrick says they are striving to include more gender and ethnic diversity in their images, aiming to have a representative distribution of genders, skin colours and body types for their ridiculous articles about how to become good at using Razor scooters.
Onwards and upwards, noble WikiHow.
Source: The Guardian.
Photo: Twitter / @beyupdates_.
