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A wiki is a website intended to be edited by its readers. Tim Berners-Lee used to consider wikis to be the realisation of his original peer-to-peer vision for the World Wide Web, but then he tripped on acid and became obsessed with 'Solid PODs'.[1] They were invented in 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham; the first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository,[2] a site to document computer programming design patterns. He derived the word "wiki" from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, meaning "fast".

Epistemic walled garden wikis were an almost standard crank product in the past decade or so - e.g., Conservapedia, PESWiki, Wiki4CAM, or David de Hilster's multiple ghost sites. Someone cranks up a copy of Mediawiki, and fills it with self-linked essays. Perhaps fellow believers will show up, though usually they don’t. Open editing usually lasts until the first critic, functionally defined as an editor who contradicts the founder.



Notable English-language wikis[edit]

There are thousands of wikis in existence, varying hugely in quality and scale. These are a few of the most well-known examples, focusing on the wikis developed for anglophone audiences or with developed English versions.


See the main article on this topic: Wikipedia

The 800-pound gorilla of wikis, Wikipedia consists of over six million articles. (And that's just the English version. There are another 19 million in various other languages.[3]) It is specifically an encyclopedia dedicated to amassing all the knowledge of the human race in one place. Its goals are not only to get this information together, but also to make it freely available. As a result, it makes extensive use of Creative Commons licensing to allow its content to be distributed. It is serious and quite dry in tone, but at least it's mostly accurate.[citation NOT needed]


wikiHow logo
Founded in 2005, wikiHow offers information on how to do just about anything, from avoiding scams[4] to installing antivirus software[5] to reacting to an ugly baby.[6] Its step-by-step guides usually include illustrations and references. While anyone can start an article on any subject, articles are subject to review, and are sometimes fact-checked by experts to ensure quality.

As of 2019, wikiHow has:[7][8]

  • Over 200,000 articles
  • Over 2 million registered users
  • 18 languages of articles
  • Over 30 million views on its most popular article[9]

It's notable for its incredibly friendly atmosphere, in which even obvious trolls are politely welcomed to contribute something positive to the community (Though insisting on being a jerk is a surefire way to get banned.), and its bizarre illustrations on some articles (See:How to fight, How to apologize to your cat, Previous versions of How to Plan a Disney Vacation).


Scholarpedia is a peer-reviewed open-access encyclopedia written and maintained by scholarly experts from around the world. Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia and aims to complement it by providing in-depth scholarly treatments of academic topics — although its licence is CC BY-NC-SA, so material can't be reused by wikis under a CC BY-SA licence. Their specific peer-review process is found here and articles accepted are published in the Scholarpedia journal. Recently, Scholarpedia has had rather few edits.


The Citizendium logo as of March 2020, even worse than their beta logo.
See the main article on this topic: Citizendium




Long estranged and non-famous Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger's later wiki project with Sam Kazemian launched in 2014. Basically formed from a bastardised fork of Wikipedia — but on the blockchain!![note 1]

Everipedia (portmanteau of everything and Wikipedia) presumptuously calls itself the “world’s biggest encyclopedia” (for having stolen all of Wikipedia’s entries and then adding more bullshit aligning with Larry’s deranged viewpoint Wikipedia’s NPOV wouldn’t accept) and promised that Everipedia would “change the world” far more than Wikipedia,[10] with the creators calling their project the “Thug Wikipedia.”[11] Everipedia is different from other wikis is that upon editing an article, one will receive an IQ token. They represent votes on the system, that will give you more authority over what gets accepted into the blockchain. All edits from new editors will have to be approved by people with more IQ tokens who would also have administrator privileges without supervision automatically. Naturally, Larry Sanger has the ultimate privileges and hence the utmost control over the entire site.

However, in October of 2019, Larry Sanger abandoned the project and announced he would be starting a new wiki project called the Encyclopshere (Just, how many failed Wikipedia forks is too much?)![12]

As “The Wikipedian” put it:-



The Content-free Encyclopedia.


There was originally one, independently operated, Uncyclopedia hosted at It was bought by Wikia Fandom, and slowly assimilated over the years. It could at that time be found at Some users tired of the ads, content warnings, terrible skin, and lack of site stats, and they created a fork (also called Uncyclopedia) which is now at Some users stayed at the Wikia Fandom site.

In February 2019, Wikia Fandom announced the closure of its English-language version of Uncyclopedia due to its offensive content.[13] The Spanish, Italian, Chinese, and Polish Uncyclopedias on Wikia Fandom also received takedown notices. Early May 14th 2019 all the Wikia Fandom Uncyclopedia sites were closed and most of the remaining contributors joined the .co site, with others moving to

Uncyclopedia has an article about us, which appears to satirise a RationalWiki page, with vandalized edits from Conservapedians in Uncyclopedia's usual fashion.[14] They also feature a "HowTo:Play RationalTroll" page in which they encourage people to vandalize RationalWiki and provide a score sheet based on how much disruption is achieved; however, said page now contains a notice encouraging users to vandalize Conservapedia instead.[15] Some Uncyclopedia users can be found on RationalWiki, and vice versa.


See the main article on this topic: Ballotpedia

An election information site. While informative, it is not entirely unbiased. Mostly written by paid staff, with some edits by "carefully vetted" members of the public, each reviewed by staff before going live.


See the main article on this topic: SourceWatch


TV Tropes[edit]

See the main article on this topic: TV Tropes

TV Tropes catalogues and celebrates the many conventions, idioms, motifs, clichés, memes and writing tools used in television, film, literature and other fiction. Entries for each "trope" link to many others, and come with an extensive list of examples, since there is no notability barrier. It has a very strong love of almost everything, but especially Joss Whedon (the wiki grew out of a fansite for Buffy the Vampire Slayer), anime and the word "egregious"(You could even say that the usage of egregious on TV Tropes is...Egregious.). It is almost impossible to visit the website for less than three six hours, a fact of which they themselves are quite boastful.[16] They also have quite a few nice things to say about us.


WikiLeaks logo
See the main article on this topic: WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks leaks things - embarrassing or incriminating documents and correspondence which governments or corporations do not wish to be published. Although it uses MediaWiki as its content management system and so looks a bit like Wikipedia, it is not really a wiki and is not publicly editable. All content is compiled by professional journalists, though anybody can submit evidence they want leaked. The founder, Julian Assange, has a bit of controversy surrounding him(to put it lightly), but that does not per se mean that the information of WikiLeaks is inaccurate.


This is what Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales actually does for a living. Originally called "WikiCities", then "Wikia", then "FANDOM" and now "Fandom" not written in all caps. It moved from to in 2019. It hosts over a hundred thousand wikis,[17] almost all of which are for obsessive fans of a particular work of fiction or game. There is almost nothing that doesn't get a wiki. (Tropers call this The Wiki Rule.) Some are quite popular, while some have only two or three obsessive basement-dwelling editors.[18]

All Fandom wikis are under free content licenses. Although staff can delete Fandom wikis for violating their terms of use, they are not usually deleted if the community gets up and leaves. Several of them were abandoned when Wikia introduced a bloody awful new skin in October 2010 and their users created new wikis elsewhere, but the ad-filled, outdated, and vandalized Fandom-hosted versions remain higher ranked on Google. Fandom is home to Liberapedia. It was home to a reboot of RationalWikiWiki until staff decided that a wiki about another wiki and its users (including notorious trolls) was not something they should be hosting and deleted it. It was also home to the original Uncyclopedia which was kept up even after Fandom changed their terms of service to exclude all racist and pornographic content in 2017, but eventually got deleted in 2019.


No clue what the arrow pointing up means.

Liberapedia is a rather sad attempt to be a left-wing response to Conservapedia. After coming close to death in 2008, it moved to Wikia (now known as Fandom). Whereas it's doing OK for a Fandom site, it is doing horribly for an online encyclopedia. The only main editor is Proxima Centauri. It only has a few thousand articles, many of which are ripped from RationalWiki and/or have nothing to do with liberalism or the site's de facto secondary mission of antitheism. They have the issues of a stub pandemic and a severe lack of active users.[note 2] In a bizarre reverse of what many wikis go through when the editors leave Fandom, when Liberapedia moved to Wikia, the abandoned independent Liberapedia was higher on Google Search for about eight months.




Irrelevant fork of even more obscure "Wikitravel" - claims to be about travel but has "travel topics" pages about basically anything and everything even very remotely related to it.[note 3] The main difference from Wikitravel is that it is run by the Wikimedia Foundation (the same folks who run Wikipedia) and is not for profit or advertisement driven. Unsurprisingly the Wikivoyage community is bigger than that at Wikitravel. However, due to Google slapping it with a huge "fork penalty" for initially having a lot of copied content from Wikitravel, you are unlikely to find its articles - even the good ones - through most search engines. In case you want to see for yourself here is a link for you.


A self-styled "non-academic encyclopedia", web portal, directory and almanac centered on the Philippines and subjects related to it. Unlike Wikipedia, the site was lenient towards original research and notability, which, combined with Filipinos' sense of vanity and narcissism, is definitely not a brilliant combination to be had. Gained controversy for its parent company being involved in the publication of allegedly erroneous textbooks,[19] although Vibal Publishing House asserted that the project and the publishing house were operated separately. The site suffered a period of decay in recent years, with most of its edits being bizarre radio station articles from a notorious Filipino hoaxer with an apparent mental condition.[20] According to their Facebook page, the site "underwent maintenance" on December 2017, but has stayed offline for several years leading to speculation that it was quietly discontinued, only to go back online in 2020 with a fresh set of content likely as part of distance learning initiatives spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Crank wikis[edit]



Communpedia describes itself as "communism, socialism and leftism-related free encyclopedia",[21] and lives up to its name. Communpedia intends to reflect the "Common Point of View" of all leftists, and not a single perspective, such as Trotskyism or Stalinism. It is essentially the far left-wing equivalent of Conservapedia. In reality, its point of view is some combination of tankie beliefs and liberal vandalism. A small site, it consists mostly of articles about "heroic" communists and socialists, with some articles discussing problems in capitalist societies and others discussing the glorious lack of problems in communist societies. It has atrocity-denying complimentary articles about North Korea[22] and heaps disgustingly infatuated piles of praise upon Hugo Chavez,[23] Vladimir Lenin,[24] Leon Trotsky,[25] Josef Stalin,[26] and Mao Zedong.[27]

Communpedia doesn't mind RationalWiki,[28] probably because they really hate Conservapedia.[29]

The original wiki appears to be offline, though there's two forks: one on Wikia and one independent website. The one on Wikia seems to be more active. Currently though, its activity is rather lacking, and the wiki is fully of content copied from Wikipedia and Anarchopedia and undone vandalism.


See the main article on this topic: Conservapedia

Conservapedia, a very small project aiming to emulate Wikipedia from a socially conservative, American, and fundamentalist Christian point of view, involves several editors and administrators who had previously faced opposition to inserting their heavily biased point of view into Wikipedia articles.[30][31] Some appear under aliases, apparently in order to distance themselves from their prior involvement with Wikipedia[32] or possibly to fit in more with a common Conservapedia username scheme.[33] As a whole, the site appears to have an unhealthy fascination with Wikipedia and its supposed faults.[34][35] It is significant to note that many of what Conservapedia administrators consider faults in Wikipedia are often repeated, to a greater degree, on their own site. Just like Encyclopædia Dramatica, many of the editors are trolls. Unlike the trolls in ED, they are unwelcome, but it's hard to tell them apart from the real editors.


Encyclopædia Dramatica[edit]

See the main article on this topic: Encyclopædia Dramatica



A Storehouse of Knowledge[edit]

See the main article on this topic: A Storehouse of Knowledge



Ameriwiki was another Conservapedia offshoot, founded by people fed up with the hostile control-freakery at CP.[36] It was created in June 2011 by the user "George Fitzgerald" following a visit to RationalWiki discussing the concept for a right-wing American Christian website that wasn't as embarrassing as Conservapedia "by being much more tolerant and accepting to editors of other worldviews, and having a radically different blocking policy".[37][38] It had over 1000 articles.[39] The last project was apparently a drive to create actual encyclopaedic content; an Ameriwiki admin pirated Wikipedia's list of required articles and encouraged people to create the whole list. It initially became the latest haven for Conservapedia refugees, ranging from longtime editors such as Rob Smith to new users who were upset with Conservapedia's Conservative and his edit spree on bestiality.[40]


Though saner than Conservapedia (which to itself is a very low standard) the site still promoted some nonsense and shouldn't have been used as a trusworthy source. For instance: rampant New Deal denialism; Global warming denialism and violation of Gore's Law, which included saying that Al Gore believes "the life of human beings is comparable to that of trees", and treating environmentalism like a Gaia-worshiping secular religion; being hilariously anti-Obama, such as immediately bringing up Solyndra when talking about the stimulus package and calling him "pro-abortion". At least they weren't Birthers though.[41]


See the main article on this topic: CreationWiki



See the main article on this topic: Metapedia



WikiSpooks is a wiki collection of political conspiracy theories. It claims to be an "encyclopedia of deep politics". On the other hand, one might call it the nutty cousin of SourceWatch.

It claims that Wikipedia is censored[42] and that for the truth behind anything political, you need to be on WikiSpooks.

Some articles are vaguely encyclopedic, but source checking is almost entirely absent. Many articles consist of a summary of the "Official Narrative" and then alternative views, which receive far more attention. Essentially, any reaction to the "official narrative" from western governments or corporations, are welcome. That means different articles contradict each other, as Wikispooks opposes both the Official Narrative and the Official Opposition Narrative. Essentially, as soon as some theory becomes vaguely credible and gathers some attention online from sources its contributors see as credible, it is part of the Official (Opposition) Narrative and must therefore be a lie. It doesn't really matter who is the Official Narrative. In World War II, the Nazis, Soviets, and Allies were all lying to us. The Holocaust is a lie.[43] The Reichstag fire is falsely claimed to be a potential false flag attack.[44]

Among other things, the website has room for articles alleging humans did not go to the moon,[45] climate change is a lie,[46] but also that fracking sucks and the fossil fuel industry are lying to us. The Holocaust both did and didn't happen in various ways. The Bilderberg Group probably controls both the IPCC and the oil industry, which are both bad and probably under one hood.


See the main article on this topic: RationalWiki



NOT to be confused with Metapedia.


See the main article on this topic: RationalWikiWiki

A meta wiki about RationalWiki, which spawned other metawikis.[47] RationalWikiWiki was closed to the public on November 14, 2012 but you can still keep track of its once furious editing pace at RationalWikiWikiWiki, and it had a pathetic reboot on Wikia (sadly now taken down). A few of its pages and talk pages were copied to here and can be found in Category:RationalWikiWiki.


Meta-Wiki is a project by the Wikimedia Foundation to boost their ego document themselves. They likely would've named it Metapedia if, well, you know. It's the go-to wiki if you want to figure out how to do anything on MediaWiki, so you'll probably have to visit it at some point [note: superseded by which now holds all public MediaWiki technical information]. A great tool to help you fall asleep at night and even at day.

Meta-Wiki is also great if you want to know more about the inner working of the Foundation [note: NOT the inner working which is already moved to and also NOT the inner technology working which is hosted in]


WikiIndex is a wiki that contains information about other wikis. Here's their entry on us.

Comparison chart[edit]

Wiki Authors Readers
Intended Actual Intended Actual
Wikipedia Everyone Nerds, vandals, paid editors, vandal fighters and academics Everyone Everyone (with internet access)
Simple English Wikipedia All English speakers Nerds and people banned from English Wikipedia People learning English Native English speakers looking for laughs
Wiktionary Geeky linguists Long-time Wikipedians People looking for definitions of words People who don't know about
Wikibooks People who like writing textbooks about obscure things Long-time Wikipedians People who like reading textbooks about obscure things Lost people using Google
Wikiquote People transcribing famous quotes made by famous people People transcribing quotes from TV shows People looking for lists of famous quotes Nobody
Wikisource People translating foreign-language public-domain texts to English People copy-pasting English texts from Project Gutenberg[note 4] People who don't know about Project Gutenberg More people than you think
Wikinews Amateur journalists Almost nobody Long-time Wikipedians Nobody
Wikiversity Teachers People only there for WikiJournal Students Almost nobody
Wikispecies Amateur biologists Nobody Long-time Wikipedians Nobody
Wikidata Nerds and data scientists Toxic nerds, SEO spammers, and vandals who get away with it Nobody People without a decent Wikipedia in their first language; people who don't know about Wikipedia
wikiHow Everyone A lot of super friendly people, kids, specialists, autistic people, and the occasional troll Everybody Everybody (including a few trolls)
Conservapedia Homeschooling conservatives Andy Schafly, his bootlickers, and some parodists Homeschooled pupils People looking for laughs and some borderline fascists
Citizendium Academics One guy and a fringe pseudoscientist All humankind The authors
TV Tropes Amateur literary analysts Fanfic enthusiasts and self-professed otaku All nerdkind The authors and people with nothing better to do
Encyclopaedia Dramatica Meme lovers, funny people, stalkers, and trolls Unfunny people, spambots, stalkers, and trolls Newbs and trolls Stalkers and trolls
Uncyclopedia Funny people Bored Wikipedians, people banned from English Wikipedia, Unfunny people, trolls People with a sense of humor Wikiholic Wikipedians
Liberapedia Parodists Proxima Centauri, Rushwrj13 Parodists The authors
ShoutWiki Community-minded people who like writing wikis People who don't like Wikia Community-minded people who like writing wikis Only there for the "bad webcomics" wiki
Miraheze Community-minded people who like writing wikis Wannabe critics, people banned from Fandom or Wikimedia Community-minded people who like writing wikis Wannabe critics
CreationWiki Vetted creationists Almost no-one All Christiankind No-one
Metapedia Nazis Assorted alt-right loners Nazis Antifa sometimes
Wrongpedia People making fun of Nazis "KATMAKROFAN" People with a sense of humor Probably not even KATMAKROFAN
Psiram Skeptics A few German skeptics Skeptics Skeptics who haven't found RationalWiki
Wikivoyage Travellers Voyagers People who don't like providing sources; touts Business travellers and tourists People who are too cheap for Lonely Planet
Wikitravel Travellllllllers Touts spambots paid admins, people with limited English, trolls People who don't know about the Wikivoyage fork Nobody
HoaxWiki Skeptics One ranting skeptic, with the occasional odd author General public Those that search for Dutch/Belgian conspiracist material and stumble upon this site
Religions Wiki Skeptics, rational thinkers A few anti-religious extremists Soon to be de-converted theists The authors
Everipedia Everyone Blockchain fans, paid editors whose articles got deleted from Wikipedia, and Larry Sanger Everyone The authors
RationalWiki Rationalists Drunk rationalists, goat fetishists, asinine pedants, power-drunk admins constantly banning each other, people who run jokes into the ground by making them way too long Fledgling rationalists Cynics, goat fetishists, and approximately one Christian high schooler who really hates the Republican party

Wiki software[edit]

There are lots of wiki engines out there, but most public wikis of any note use MediaWiki. (The only one listed above that doesn't is TV Tropes, which uses a version of PMWiki that has been altered and stretched over time.) This is why almost every wiki out there using its default skin Vector looks more-or-less like Wikipedia.


See also[edit]

External links[edit]


  1. See also:
  2. Then again, most Fandom sites seem to either be virtually abandoned (some haven't been edited for years), run by one admin who acts as a dictator using other admins as proxies, or both (sometimes, a wiki only has one admin left active, who then proceeds to take control of the site).
  3. For example, Wikivoyage has pages on the Roman Empire and the the British Raj and a lengthy discussion of sunscreen that was even previously featured on the wiki's main page.
  4. I mean, it was literally at some point called "Project Sourceberg".[citation NOT needed]


  1. TIM BERNERS-LEE. One Small Step for the Web... SEPTEMBER 28, 2018
  2. - still going, eighteen years later!
  4. How to Avoid Scams - wikiHow
  5. How to Install an Antivirus - wikiHow
  6. How to React to an Ugly Baby - wikiHow
  7. About wikiHow
  8. wikiHow: Statistics
  9. wikiHow: Popular pages
  11. Interview with the Founders of Everipedia AKA the “Thug Wikipedia” from Techrasa
  13. Forum:A message from Fandom (archived)archived
  14. on the .co site, on the .ca site.
  15. on the .co site
  16. Munroe, R. "Tab explosion." XKCD 609.
  19. Philippine Daily Inquirer article about the textbook scandal
  20. Long-term abuse/Bertrand101
  30. Roger Schlafly
  31. Ed Poor
  32. Conservative/kdbuffalo
  33. RobS/Nobs/Nobs01
  34. Examples of Bias in Wikipedia
  35. How Conservapedia Differs from Wikipedia
  37. Forum:Ameripedia?
  38. User:Ameripedia/Ameriwiki
  39. and counting
  40. See screenshot here.
  42. FAQ Wikispooks
  43. The Holocaust "The Holocaust". Wikispooks. 
  44. "Reichstag Fire". Wikispooks. 
  45. "Moon landings conspiracy theories". Wikispooks. 
  46. Climate Change “Climate Change” Wikispooks
  47. See, RationalWikiWiki and RationalWikiWikiWiki and maybe even RationalWikiWikiWikisWiki...