Frequently Asked Questions

Can I write for OkButWhy?

Yes — we’re always glad to meet new writers in science, art, and philosophy. The rules and how to apply are on our Join Our Team page. If you’d rather help on the software or design side, say hello through Contact; volunteers are welcome there too.

Where do your images come from?

Honesty and transparency matter to us, so here’s the straight answer. We don’t have the budget to license stock photography, so our main sources are free, royalty-free images shared by volunteers on platforms like Pixabay and Pexels. We also make many of our own designs in tools like Canva and Photoshop. Where an image has a specific source, we credit it with a link right below the image, and when a visual is AI-assisted, we say so.

Do you pay writers?

No. OkButWhy is entirely volunteer-run and has no income, so we can’t pay writers or contributors. Everything here is published by people who wanted to share something worth knowing, with no financial strings attached.

Can I use OkButWhy’s content?

For non-commercial use, you’re free to share, copy, and redistribute articles from our Science, Art, and Philosophy categories without asking us first — as long as you follow the citation rules in our Copyright section. Please don’t alter the content without permission. The “On Living” section is different: those are personal essays, and you’ll need the author’s permission to reuse them.

You say OkButWhy started in 2023, so why are some articles older?

Some pieces are dated 2021 or 2022 because they predate OkButWhy’s 2023 launch — the project simply existed in an earlier form before then.

I think I found an error in an article. What should I do?

Please tell us. Every article is checked against its sources by our editors and a fact-checker, and writers often spend days on a single piece — but an obvious mistake can still slip past many careful readings, and translation can occasionally introduce one too. If you spot something, use the Contact page, choose “Complaint” as the topic, and point us to the article and the error. When we confirm a factual mistake, we fix it and add a dated note explaining what changed. Catching these genuinely helps us.

What is the “On Living” category?

OkButWhy has two kinds of content. Most of the site — Science, Art, and Philosophy — is written in objective language and cites its sources; subjective comments appear only to make things clearer. “On Living” is the other kind: personal essays where a writer shares their own view on some part of life. Those pieces don’t cite sources, make no claim to prove anything, and don’t reflect the views of OkButWhy — they’re one person’s perspective. We don’t publish content that targets people over race, religion, language, gender, or class.

I keep seeing “Doğa Filozofu.” What does that mean?

Doğa Filozofu is Turkish for “Natural Philosopher,” and it’s the original site OkButWhy grew from. The idea began in Turkish as Doğa Filozofu; we started writing in English as OkButWhy to reach readers everywhere.

The name is deliberate. The thinkers before Socrates are called natural philosophers because they were the first to look at nature and ask what it’s actually made of, instead of accepting the answers handed down in myth. Questioning, for us, is the whole point — and you can only understand nature by studying it. Those same thinkers are often counted as history’s first scientists: Thales, the earliest of them some 2,500 years ago, wasn’t using modern methods, but he was looking for real explanations rather than legends. The term stuck around, too — Isaac Newton called himself a natural philosopher, and the full title of his Principia is “Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.”

Where can I follow, watch, or listen?

New articles go up most days, and you don’t have to read to keep up: OkButWhy also lives as short videos and as a podcast, so you can read, watch, or listen — whichever suits the moment. Find us on Instagram, X, and YouTube, or get the highlights by email through the subscribe box on the site.

How can I support us?

OkButWhy is volunteer-run and non-profit. The best way to help is simply to share our work with people who’d enjoy it, or to write with us — see our Support Us page for the details.