Wikis: how is wikipedia different from wiktionary? What do you (who use both) think?

A long while back we had this internal metaphor: if you imagine the whole of information on the web as a great big library, somewhere in that library there is a gigantic multi-volume encyclopaedia. That's Wikipedia. Wikia is everything else that's on the shelves. Or at least can be. ;)

Wikia and Wikipedia are quite distinct, but before I get to the differences, let me take you through the similarities.

Both sites use the same software, MediaWiki, though the two implementations have diverged over the years.

Both also have the same core content creation model: anybody can contribute by creating new pages, editing existing content, categorizing, etc. Those two points together mean that, by definition, some of the user interactions are similar, too.

Now on to the differences!

First up: single community vs network of communities.

Wikipedia is a single big -- gigantic -- community of editors, organised around one site (note: this is an oversimplification, since there are other language versions, and side-projects, but lets keep it simple here).

Wikia, on the other hand, has somewhere north of 400 000 active communities, each with it's own site. And while that number gets a bit smaller if you ignore micro-communities of a couple people, it's still a huge number of sites. And here's where it gets really interesting: each site has it's own flavour, it's own rules (who calls the shots? do we vote? do we decide by consensus?) and -- barring some core principles and best practices we put forward -- a fair degree of autonomy in how it's run, structured and presented to readers.

On Wikipedia you become part of the community of editors, and add content. On Wikia you can do that, too, but there's a whole network of communities to chose from, each with a single topic. And if there isn't one for you, you can create a new one.

The second major difference is that of subject matter.

Wikipedia strives to collect the sum of all knowledge (that is deemed important enough to be preserved in an encyclopaedia).

Wikia strives to be the home of fandom, the place fans of, well, anything, go to immerse themselves in their hobbies, passtimes and fictional worlds.

This key difference in basic assumptions about what each site is, results in a dramatic divergence in the level of detail each site offers.

To illustrate: Wikipedia has a page about Star Wars, as a work of cinematic art and cultural phenomenon, and also pages about key characters and concepts that have been transmitted into popular culture -- that's what important to preserve as part of the human heritage; Wikia, through Wookieepedia, it's Star Wars community, has hundreds of thousands of pages about every single detail -- 'cause that's what's important to the fans!

Naturally, this divergence also leads to a difference in the demographics of users, with Wikia's contributors and viewers tending to be younger (teenagers and college students).

To sum up: Wikia and Wikipedia use a similar content creation mechanism to fill two very different roles on the Internet.

The English Wikipedia is a wiki that uses the Mediawiki software and whose costs are covered by the Wikimedia Foundation.

I'll just give examples related to each term.

• Wikipedia: The English Wikipedia (Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia), the German Wikipedia (Wikipedia – Die freie Enzyklopädie), the French Wikipedia (Wikipédia, l'encyclopédie libre), etc (see wikipedia.org). There are currently official Wikipedias in 287 languages. (List of Wikipedias)
• Wikimedia, or The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF): A non-profit organisation that operates the servers on which all the above Wikipedias run, as well as other projects (in many languages) like Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikibooks, Wikiquote... (see Complete list of Wikimedia projects or List of Wikimedia projects by size). It is also the organisation to which your donations go. :-) (Wikimedia Foundation)
• Mediawiki: the (open-source) software that is used for Wikipedia, Wikitionary, and others, but (being open-source) also for projects entirely unconnected to either Wikipedia or the Wikimedia Foundation. For example, the same software is used for Uncyclopedia, for Wookieepedia (Star Wars wiki), for ScoutWiki, for BR Bullpen (baseball-reference), for Television Tropes & Idioms, for WikiLeaks, for Gentoo Wiki, for How to do anything (Wikihow), for my friend Vipul Naik's Groupprops wiki on group theory, etc, etc. (MediaWiki)
• wiki: Essentially any website that anyone can edit. This includes all the examples I mentioned in the previous bullet (TV Tropes, Wikileaks, Wookiepedia, etc.), but also those using some other software instead of Mediawiki (like MoinMoin or PmWiki) -- more examples are Python Wiki, EmacsWiki, Ubuntu Wiki, Sahityam (lyrics of Carnatic music), many people's personal websites, etc. (Wiki)

Wikia

• Website, while free of charge to users, is for Profit.
• Founded in late 2004 (as “Wikicities”) and launched on October 18th of that same year.
• Changed their name to the current name, “Wikia”, in late March of 2006, only a year and a few months after they launched.
• Users / Visitors have more freedom to write &/or edit more extensively detailed information on popular media topics such as Fan Fiction, Science Fiction TV series, Comic Books & Movies.

Wikipedia

• Website is hosted by a nonprofit organization known as Wikimedia Foundation.
• Founded in 2001.
• Company has kept the same name since they were first established.
• A lot of detailed information on Fan-related information, in regards to media such as Cimic Books & TV Shows, are limited by Wikipedia’s Notability Policies.

The difference is that all the nearly 300 languages versions of Wikipedia are Encyclopaedias, but not all encyclopaedias are Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is a free encyclopaedia on the internet that is written and maintained by volunteers and which aims to have a neutral point of view. It is a general reference work that aims to make the sum of all knowledge freely available to all. Other Encyclopaedias exist that differ from Wikipedia in every one of these respects:

• Not all encyclopaedias are free, some only exist in printed book form or by subscription. In the 1990s Encarta was an Encyclopaedia one could buy on CD.
• Not all encyclopaedias are on the Internet, indeed Encyclopaedias existed for more than a century before the Internet.
• Some Encyclopaedias are or were written and maintained by paid staff rather than volunteers.
• Not all Encyclopaedias have or even aspire to have a neutral point of view. Currently there are encyclopaedias available in China which cover subjects such as Falun Gong and the Tiananmen Square massacre
  [1]
  in ways that the Chinese government approves. Wikipedia as a not for profit can afford to cover subjects in ways that sometimes lead to it being banned in China and other censorious countries.
• Wikipedia’s aim is to make the sum of all knowledge freely available to all. Other encyclopaedias often have more specific objectives and cover narrower fields such as “birds in the UK” or Medicine.

Other encyclopedias are like sharks that can hunt for themselves and Wikipedia is like the remoras or pilot fish following a shark. Other encyclopedias are compiled by professionals, carefully fact-checked and carefully edited. Wikipedia is a crowdsourced project operated by amateurs and volunteers. The biggest inherent difference in that is that the professionals can conduct their own research and include their findings in their encyclopedia, but Wikipedians must seek out professional publications, their reliable sources, and copy them.

That doesn’t mean that its content is necessarily wrong. Despite bigger odds than anyone’s really given them credit for, Wikipedians managed to put together and enforce some pretty effective rules about reliable sourcing and against just putting whatever you think is true in an article, no matter how right you are. A Wikipedian is not allowed to alter the article on John Smith to say “John Smith was arrested on 5th street today,” not even if they saw it happen with their own eyes. They must wait for a newspaper or other professional publication to report the arrest—or get their hands on a copy of the police report—and only then may they update the article. Even a Wikipedian who is a professional historian or scientist may not add their own conclusions to a Wikipedia article, no matter how painstakingly they arrived at them. They can try to publish their work and so create reliable sources for other Wikipedians to use, but they are not allowed to stand on their own reputations as an encyclopedia contributor would.

That doesn’t mean the content is necessarily right. The downside of this is that if the reliable sources are biased (example: many say the mainstream media skews liberal), then the Wikipedia article will be too, and in a way it should be. If the only Wikipedians interested in looking up reliable sources are the ones who believe in a certain interpretation of events (or if they can get the people who disagree with them sanctioned or framed for misconduct and kicked off the site), that’s another way Wikipedia can end up biased.

Wikipedia is edited by anonymous, untrained, non scholarly volunteers operating (in a perfect world) by a set guidelines to ensure accuracy. In practice, this is, (how shall I put this?), a joke.

Wikipedia is almost impossible for anyone new to edit. Wikipedia and the Slant Factor and has very likely fallen into the hands of special interests.

A real encyclopedia is written and edited by experts in their respective field and goes through a process of careful review. The difference is quite noticeable.

(Yes, there was a Nature study done that showed Wikipedia to be substantially accurate, but the study was horribly flawed.)

First of all, Wikipedia and Wikia are both company’s run by the same people, so it doesn’t make sense to think of them as competitors.

Secondly, Wikipedia is trying to be the world’s largest encyclopedia (and doing pretty good at it). Wikia on the other hand is a hosting service where people can run websites using the wiki software free of charge. Their slogan “The Home of Fandom” indicates it’s intended to house content that (for one reason or another) is not suitable for Wikipedia - for example all the minutia of a specific book series, movie or television show. So they complement each other; they’re not competitors.

No.

A “wiki” is a website that anyone can edit. “Anyone” means literally anyone: any person who reads a wiki website can change most of the pages on that website.

The wiki idea appeared in mid-1990s on some websites for programmers, who trusted each other to make helpful edits, and fix each other’s pages.

In 2001 Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger thought that it can be a good idea to try the wiki approach for writing a general-purpose encyclopedia, and they called it “Wikipedia”. The rest is history: it turned out the wiki idea worked exceptionally well for this website, and it became one of the most popular websites, and the most famous wiki by far, so much that a lot of people don’t even know what did “wiki” originally mean.

There are still a lot of wiki websites today. Wikipedia is just the most famous one.

I think there is a misunderstanding here. You should definitely checkout Differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki[1] and see that :

1. Wikipedia : A global wiki which runs on Mediawiki software, maintained and hosted by Wikimedia Team. To be precise [1]: Wikipedia is a Wikimedia project that is a global, free and multilingual internet encyclopedia. It is the oldest, and largest, Wikimedia project, predating the Wikimedia Foundation itself. Wikipedia is a wiki that runs on the MediaWiki software.
2. Wikimedia : The Non Profit Movement which maintains and develops MediaWiki and hosts a number of wikis ( including Wikipedia ) . To be exact [1]: Wikimedia is the collective name for the Wikimedia movement, revolving around a group of inter-related projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and others, which aim to use the collaborative power of the Internet, and the wiki concept, to create and share free knowledge of all kinds.

First question, there are many other online encyclopedias. The ones in English are mostly created in order to fix something that is wrong about how Wikipedia operates. Several years ago at a Wikipedia picnic I met an editor of Conservapedia. He complained a little about the way both of them work, but mostly wanted to chat about other matters. A few years ago I at a Wikipedia conference in Boston I met Betty Wills, who has since started Justapedia. We discussed photography and I taught her a method of geotagging that I learned a couple years earlier at a Wikiconference in Montreal. Neither of these, in my opinion, have much chance of seriously rivaling Wikipedia. Some of the others aren’t at all trying to do that; they work a niche topic. Some others are in other languages and are closer to even with the Wikipedia of their language

Second question, I edit Wikidata somewhat less often than I edit English Wikipedia. It is among other things a storehouse of data used by most of the 300 Wikipedias and several other websites. This includes geographical coordinates, which are my main WD work. WD is also a guide to other databases; I have set up a few connections to the Historical Marker Database. Some of my colleangues who are librarians or art historians have linked items to Worldcat, Library of Congress and other GLAM databases. Wikidata is pretty boring to most people; it doesn’t do narrative since it doesn’t belong to any particular language.

I was discussing this question with three librarian friends on the campus of Rutgers University four hours ago. I explained the proverb among editors, “Be very careful, and very open, if you’re connected to the subject by blood, money, or love.” So, when my mother suggested that I write a biography of her father, I had to decline. I loved that old man, too, which is part of the reason why.

Yes, the persons who know most about a subject are the ones who care most about it, and those are the ones who are most likely to show a bias. So, I explained to my librarian friend, I started almost 20 years ago with writing about telephone switching technlogy, my life’s work. Later, I found out that this was contrary both to telephone company policy and Wikipedia policy. WP policy on this matter was, I knew, taken more seriously, and that’s the one that persuaded me to write instead about radio technology, civil engineering, and astronomy, topics in which I was a fan but not a pro.

My Wikipedia User Page

gives some information about my background, from which relevant biases may be inferred. Ensuring that it’s all out in the open can be a big help.

Yes? No? Maybe?

This is somewhat a vague question: what does “of its kind” mean?

• Editable by anyone?
• A wiki designed to be an encyclopedia?
• A wiki on the scale of Wikipedia?

Obviously wikis are supposed to be generally editable, though some claim the name falsely (wikileaks comes to mind), but some require everyone to register, others don’t. So certainly Wikipedia is nothing special there.

There are several wikis that seek to be encyclopedias, including the somewhat counterposing alternatives of RationalWiki and Conservapedia, so it’s not unique on those grounds either.

It probably is unique in terms of scale. There might be others with more pages, but in terms of active edits, active editors, reader count and finances it’s definitely unique - no-one even comes close.

Wikipedia is about topics which can be explored with depth and have scholarship which discuss the topics in context. This is because Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and encyclopedia are supposed to be able to give you depth discussion of topics. Wiktionary on the other hand is about definitions of terms or explaining something at its most base level and how it can be used because it is dictionary. Dictionaries have very different purposes then encyclopedias. Most often if a topic is discussed by scholars, reporters or some other respected researching authority then Encyclopedias are the place. If you simply wan to define a singular word, Wiktionary.

Everyone can do that, even without registration (but if you are not registered, you are paradoxically more easily identifyable via your IP, which then serves in place of your nickname). You can edit articles, and you can create new articles.

Everyone else can easily revert your edits, though. But they can’t delete the articles you created.

There is a number of privileged users, the admins, who are elected (in an online process) regularly, and they can delete articles (mostly after a lengthy written discussion in the WP pages if the article deserves deletion), and moderate conflicts (if two authors revert their edits back and forth.)

In non-controversial topics this works great. In loaded topics, not so much. Coalitions of like-minded users are able to “occupy” them.

The target audience is information junkies like me. Wikipedia allows me to access generic information about a wide range of topics. Generic information does not have to have a strict level of authority.

It also provides easy reference when I tried to recall certain bits of information like energy density of various fuels. The fact that it is centralized is really useful. Lets say I encountered certain info on wikipedia like type of boiler that was used in Ivanpah Solar power plant, the fact that I know it is on wikipedia allows me to refer to its name (which is Renntech type D) by simply going to its wiki page.

Wikipedia also plays a large part in helping me understand elementary particles (leptons, quarks etc.) and their behaviour. There are also other topics that it helped me learn. Of course they wouldn't have all information. Maybe they would have information on adiabatic efficiency of Roots blower but they wouldn't have adiabatic efficiency of centrifugal supercharger and twin screw supercharger. But I don't go to wikipedia to expect to learn a specific thing but rather I am flexible on the type of information that I gain from wikipedia.

It only becomes too little of an information when I need to specialize on certain topics like how to build a bubble coumn reactor for 100 ktpa ethylene dichloride production