He was perusing the Wiki-How Web site (http://wiki.ehow.com) - the self-professed, universal "How-To Manual That Anyone Can Write or Edit" - when he came upon an article on teaching a child to ride a bicycle.

"It occurred to me that learning to ride on a grassy field would make tipping over a lot less painful, so I added that," White says. "That became my first contribution, inspired by what I learned with my own daughter."

Since then, the 32-year-old Salt Lake City electrical engineer has made other contributions including tips for how to get into standing position on a surf board and maintain proper foot placement once up. White, an avid outdoorsman, is now working on his first full-fledged article on how to properly trim ski skins to fit on backcountry skis.

"One of the cool things about Wiki-How is it is personal - less strictly factual and more the real 'feel' of something," he adds. "Then you get the feedback. It's like a real conversation, almost."

Wiki-How site

for all to use - and to write

That is the appeal of the Wiki phenomenon, where everyday people can rise to the status of experts. Here is how it works:

First, you register, filling out a one-page form with such information as user name, password, e-mail address and your real name. Anyone can write; anyone can edit. You can tweak an existing entry or create a new one. And Wiki community is self-policing. Once submitted, any entry can be changed to correct errors or expand information, yet the sites are remarkably organized. Participants are assumed to be acting in good faith.

"Sites like ours are just the beginning for the Wiki model," says Wiki-How founder Jack Herrick. "There are so many people out there with ideas, people with problems and people who like to help each other."

Mass Appeal: It may have made more sense for Wiki inventor Ward Cunningham to call his 1995 collaborative, multi-platform application Open Web. Quick Web - which he briefly considered - would have worked, too.

But Cunningham liked the Hawaiian word Wiki, or "fast," which he picked up during a honeymoon trip to the islands. And if the Portland, Ore., programmer was in love, so soon were his colleagues in the global "open source," or free software community.

"In creating Wiki, I wanted to stroke that story-telling nature in all of us," Cunningham said in a recent interview with Artima, an online programmer's publication. "Perhaps most important, I wanted people who wouldn't normally author to find it comfortable authoring."

With the 2001 birth of the program's best-known offshoot, Wikipedia, the era of "open editing" on the Web had become a full-fledged, evolutionary step for the Internet. This past week the collaborative, living digital encyclopedia had topped 770,220 articles, 2.4 million pages, was nearing 500,000 registered users.

Wikipedia has spawned its own, numerous cyber-progeny, among them Wiktionary, a free, open-content dictionary (http:// www.wiktionary.org); Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org) a repository free digital textbooks and manuals; and Wikinews (http://en.wikinews.org), an egalitarian answer to established journalism.

But it is the advent of broader-appeal sites like Wiki-How that has allowed Cunningham's programming breakthrough to move beyond eggheads to a more rank-and-file Internet audience.

Unveiled in January, Wiki-How had 2,000 users its first month. By the end of September, more than 450,000 had logged on, and in mid-October, the site's counter ticked past 1.5 million total contributors; roughly 4 million people visit the site monthly.

Growing Information Bank: Successful as it is, Wiki-How remains a non-profit endeavor for Palo Alto, Calif.'s Herrick, a computer engineer, and his partner Josh Hannah, a financial adviser. It is built upon the ashes of a failed commercial "how-to" site, eHow, which the two friends bought after it went bankrupt in 2004.

Working evenings and weekends, Herrick and Hannah recovered enough of the old eHow's content to establish a solid cache of articles. Contributions today top 3,000, with the site not yet a year old.

Topics include arts, hobbies, finances, automobiles, pets, computers, travel, gardening and relationships to name just a few.

Want to "Become a Human Beat Box?" There's an article on that rap-music utilization of the mouth as percussion instrument. For example, to develop a good bass drum sound, press your lips together as you build up air pressure, then expel the air through a closed jaw and lips allowed to part on the sides. Boom, baby.

Good Citizen Users: Self-promotion, or product pitches, are banned, as are articles deemed by peers to be patently illegal or harmful. Racist or hate-promoting articles have been deleted - a process begun by users nominating an item, then offering comments pro and con, with the site administrator acting on the consensus.

"While anyone could come on and post things that are wrong, or even vandalize the site, our users are our best control," Herrick says. "They are good citizens of our community. With a few minutes to a few days at most, mistakes are corrected and vandalism disappears."

If someone writes an article about how to build a deck and uses the wrong screws or fails to include a support beam, for example, Wiki-How minions quickly sniff out the problem. "These are people who go out and actually build the decks themselves, and if the instructions aren't perfect they come back and correct them," Herrick says.

A prime example of this collaboration is the site's most popular article yet: "Call in Sick to When You Just Need a Day Off." Nearly 120,000 people have read the item, at last count boasting 15 writers.

Among the tips: Find a quiet place for the phone call; keep the excuse short and to the point; get off the phone as quickly as possible, and, if you can, call your boss's voice mail or send him an e-mail rather than speaking with him or her directly.

"This avoids the possibility of questions and awkward advice," the article advises.

And if you are the boss who discovers a bogus sick call, the site has advice on "How to Fire an Employee."

Among other things, that article advises, "Be sure to communicate their performance problems as soon as you are aware of them, and coach them on how to improve." Important: do it in private, and think about the worker's responsibilities and be ready to assign them to someone else.

"Tell them the purpose of the meeting within 30 seconds of them entering the room. If you have done your job properly they will not be surprised, and you will only torture them by drawing it out."

bmims@sltrib.com

It's a Wiki-Wiki World

Wiki is an cross-platform (i.e., using many operating systems and Internet browsers) application that allows registered users unrestricted Web site editing access.

The first Wiki site, WikiWikiWeb, was launched March 25, 1995 by Ward Cunningham, a Portland, Ore., programmer who invented the base application and its name.

While the term Wiki evokes association with the word Wicca, there is no connection. Wiki is Hawaiian for "quick" or "fast"; Wicca is a neopagan, nature-based religion.