The problem
You decide to learn to snowboard, or to do a handstand. The knowledge is out there, but it is
spread across hundreds of videos and forum threads with no order to them. You don't know where
to start, or whether the advice you found is ten years out of date. So you pay. An instructor
charges by the hour. An app sells you a course that one creator recorded years ago and hasn't
touched since, or a company has put the useful lessons behind a subscription. Either way, what
is actually standing between you and the skill is usually money.
Open source showed there is another way
Most of the software the world runs on was written by people who gave it away. That wasn't
charity. A shared thing that anyone can improve tends to end up better than a product one
company sells, because thousands of people keep fixing it. Wikipedia works the same way, and so
does the operating system this page is probably being served from.
Progresspedia applies that idea to skills. Every course is a living document. Anyone can read
it and anyone can fix it, and each correction is there for the next person who comes along. The
people learning a skill are the ones writing it down.
What we actually do
We don't make tutorials from scratch. Most skills already have a good video or forum post for
each step, made by someone who knows it far better than we do. What's missing is the order. So
contributors take the best explanations they can find, arrange them into a path, and write the
bits in between: what to learn first, and what a good attempt actually looks like. Where a video
already exists, we link to it and credit whoever made it.
Then the course keeps changing. Someone finishes it, notices a step that was missing or a cue
that didn't help, and edits it. A recorded course can't do that.