Wiki

A wiki is a website intended to be edited by its readers. 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'. They were invented in 1995 by programmer Ward Cunningham; the first wiki was the Portland Pattern Repository, 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.

Efficacy
Among the various methods available to get your point across on the internet, the wiki is possibly the most cunning, if it can be kept up. Blogs need you to write something witty, incisive or thought provoking. Podcasts need you to say something witty, incisive, and original and read it out convincingly (useful for people who like the sound of their own voice). Wikis, however, don't need that. All you have to do is start it up... and other people write your content for you. This means that you can pretend your point of view has wide support, without doing any work at all!

Notable English-language wikis
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.

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. )  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.

wikiHow
Founded in 2005, wikiHow offers information on how to do just about anything, from avoiding scams to installing antivirus software to reacting to an ugly baby. 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:
 * Over 200,000 articles
 * Over 2 million registered users
 * 18 languages of articles
 * Over 30 million views on its most popular article

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
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 &mdash; 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.

Citizendium


Citizendium was the original challenger to the crown of Wikipedia. Its main difference was that its editing policy was less open, requiring all users to register under their real name and allowing only "experts" to approve articles. While a decent enough idea, its attempts to define "expert" soon fell prey to credentialism — the academics were rapidly repelled, leaving room for cranks with spurious qualifications to hijack prominent articles, leading to pseudoscience topics being covered in a less than critical light. Launched at the start of 2007 with considerable mainstream publicity and claims that it would grow to rival Wikipedia's size, it grew slightly during its first year and then fizzled out. Although still limping along, it has far fewer contributors than the wiki you are reading now, RationalWiki.

Everipedia
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!!

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, with the creators calling their project the “Thug Wikipedia.” 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?)!

As “The Wikipedian” put it:-

Uncyclopedia
Uncyclopedia, "the content-free encyclopedia", is a parody of Wikipedia. Inevitably, for a collaborative work of comedy, the quality and humour varies markedly, from some patches of excellent satire to lame nonsense propped up with tired internet memes.

There was originally one, independently operated, Uncyclopedia hosted at uncyclopedia.org. It was bought by Wikia, which later changed its name to Fandom, and slowly assimilated over the years. It could at that time be found at uncyclopedia.wikia.com. Some users got 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 uncyclopedia.co. Some users stayed at the Wikia/Fandom site.

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

Uncyclopedia has an article about us, which appears to satirise a RationalWiki page, with vandalized edits from Conservapedians in Uncyclopedia's usual fashion. 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. Some Uncyclopedia users can be found on RationalWiki, and vice versa.

Ballotpedia
An US 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.

SourceWatch
SourceWatch documents corporate and industry front groups and their FUD campaigns. It tends to concentrate on environmental issues like global warming denialism, however it covers a wide range of issues related to government and corporate PR.

TV Tropes
TV Tropes catalogs 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 is almost impossible to visit the website for less than three six hours, a fact of which they are quite boastful. They used to have articles about us and Conservapedia, but both have since been deleted for failing their article standards. It loves almost everything, especially Joss Whedon (the wiki grew out of Buffistas.org, a fansite for Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and the word "egregious."

WikiLeaks


WikiLeaks leaks things - embarrassing or incriminating documents and correspondence which governments or corporations do not wish to be published. Although it once used MediaWiki as its content management system and so looks a bit like Wikipedia, it eventually shied away from the wiki-style contribution method, therefore it is not really a wiki and is not publicly editable; a read-only archive of the site in its MediaWiki incarnation is accessible, however. 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.

Fandom
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 wikia.com to fandom.com in 2019. It hosts over a hundred thousand wikis, 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.

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. Over the last few years several more wikis have jumped ship as Fandom became filled to the brim with intrusive advertisements that make even simple navigation a challenge. Fandom was home to Liberapedia until April 2023. 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.

Liberapedia
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). It did OK for a Fandom site, but horribly for an online encyclopedia. Its main editor, and for long stretches of time its only editor, was our Proxima Centauri. It only had a few thousand articles, many of which were ripped from RationalWiki and/or had nothing to do with liberalism or the site's de facto secondary mission of antitheism. They had the issues of a stub pandemic and a severe lack of active users. 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.

In April 2023, Liberapedia was closed on Fandom and its new home is apparently on Miraheze.

Wikitravel
The original travel wiki. After it was purchased by Internet Brands (IB) and was converted into a for-profit advertising hellhole with corporate admins who don't give a crap about the community, it became more and more outdated and irrelevant. Nowadays it is mostly used by spambots, touts and IB's paid admins trying to sweep the desert.

Wikivoyage
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. 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.

Wikipilipinas
A self-styled "non-academic encyclopedia", web portal, directory and almanac centered on the Philippines and subjects related to it. Unlike Wikipedia, the site has been lenient towards original research and notability, which, combined with some 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, 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. According to their Facebook page, the site "underwent maintenance" on December 2017, but stayed offline for several years leading to speculation that it was quietly discontinued. It went back online in 2020 with a fresh set of content, likely as part of distance learning initiatives spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. Editing is now currently restricted to a select few users, though they do accept email applications for interested contributors.

Crank wikis
There are many obscure and dubious sites run by various cranks, far from the public radar, although many are well-known among RationalWiki editors, in relation to our site's mission.

Communpedia
Communpedia describes itself as "communism, socialism and leftism-related free encyclopedia", 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 and heaps disgustingly infatuated piles of praise upon Hugo Chavez, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Josef Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

Communpedia doesn't mind RationalWiki, probably because they really hate Conservapedia.

The original wiki appears to be offline, though there's two forks: one on Wikia and one independent website. The Wikia one closed not long after however.

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. Some appear under aliases, apparently in order to distance themselves from their prior involvement with Wikipedia or possibly to fit in more with a common Conservapedia username scheme. As a whole, the site appears to have an unhealthy fascination with Wikipedia and its supposed faults. 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.

While being frustrated in their attempts to insert a respect for real world scientific facts at Conservapedia, the founders and most of the original editors of RationalWiki "met" each other.

Encyclopædia Dramatica
Encyclopædia Dramatica is a "lulz"-related wiki, populated largely by trolls. Article subjects included internet memes, users of various sites and forums, and their online dramas. NSFL!

Despite being full of flashing porn ads, the site's owner claimed it failed to make much money, and it was unilaterally taken down without warning in April 2011 and replaced with Oh Internet, a worksafe version of the same idea. ED itself was resurrected by hacker Ryan Cleary soon after.

A Storehouse of Knowledge
Just as Citizendium was a personal competitor to Wikipedia, A Storehouse of Knowledge was set up as a personal competitor to Conservapedia, promoting a "biblical worldview". Founded by (now ex-) Conservapedia user Philip J. Rayment in March 2009. It's like everyone wants their own pet wiki project. When will it end!?!? Apparently defunct, now leads to a 403 Forbidden.

Ameriwiki
Ameriwiki was another Conservapedia offshoot, founded by people fed up with the hostile control-freakery at CP. 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". It had over 1000 articles. 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.

The wiki was moved to its own domain, chaos ensued due to a single troll, the founder left and came back and left again, and three different offshoot wikis resulted in this chaos. Site owner "Sam Coulter," who took over after Fitzgerald left, ran the site until its demise, which was probably because Coulter stopped paying the bills. Only a few pages of this wiki have been archived.

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.

ProleWiki
ProleWiki is a self-described communist (Marxist-Leninist) and anti-imperialist proletarian encyclopedia founded in 2020. It claims to "provide a resourceful source of information to workers from all nations", and it is in support of various "socialist" governments, such as China, the DPRK, and Vietnam. It appears to deny or ignore war crimes committed by the "anti-imperialist" governments of Russia and Iran in Ukraine and uncritically promotes the narrative spun by "anti-imperialist" news outlets such as the Grayzone and RT.

InfraWiki
InfraWiki is a wiki created by banned editors on ProleWiki aligned with the Infrared community in October 2022 to promote MAGA communism. Despite calling itself communist, it is in favor of right-wing American nationalism, including Donald Trump. It also contains sexist and homophobic statements.

CreationWiki
CreationWiki is, as the name would seem to suggest, a creationist wiki. Editing is by approved members only, and non-creationists, if they are permitted access at all, are barred from contributing to articles. The number of active editors is, thankfully, very small.

Metapedia
Metapedia describes itself as "an electronic encyclopedia about culture, art, science, philosophy and politics", but could be more accurately described as an echo chamber for neo-Nazis to rant in. It covers somewhat controversial subjects, such as why homosexuality is a mental illness, how race is certainly a real thing, how science proves that people with dark skin are a bunch of damn dirty apes, and how Adolf Hitler was an under-appreciated visionary. It also seems to be all but dead. How sad.

WikiSpooks
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 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. The Reichstag fire is falsely claimed to be a potential false flag attack.

Among other things, the website has room for articles alleging humans did not go to the moon, climate change is a lie, 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.

Us!
RationalWiki is a large and well respected very small project that was originally established to address and refute the likes of CreationWiki and Conservapedia from a rationalist point of view. As well as a wiki in an encyclopedic sense (with over 7500 content articles), it also doubles as a discussion forum. Although still primarily attracting traffic due to its commentary on Conservapedia, RationalWiki does have a few articles that appear in the top of Google's search rankings, thanks to its almost complete lack of notability requirements to write articles about any form of crank idea — the equivalent criterion at RW is "missionality."

RationalWikiWiki
A meta wiki about RationalWiki, which spawned other metawikis. 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
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 MediaWiki.org 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 foundation.wikimedia.org and also NOT the inner technology working which is hosted in wikitech.wikimedia.org]

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

Wiki software
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.

Some prominent open source software sites (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, X.org) favour MoinMoin, for some reason. (In the case of X.org, because it's written in Python rather than PHP.)