A wiki is a hypertext publication housing a digital knowledge base, which typically facilitates collaborative editing as it allows the public or specific members of an organization to create and modify pages for the audience, though pages can be restricted and users can be blocked.

The internet houses an endless number of wikis, as they are usually easy to make, so most wikis will simply choose to provide a short list of notable or relevant wikis. You can find attempts at a near-comprehensive lists, but WikiStats only covers MediaWiki forks, some of which have shut down, and the Wiki Wiki is perpetually limited to the amount of editors that it has attracted to achieve this Sisyphean task.

Regardless of its scale or scope, a wiki's merit and trustworthiness isn't always something that can be easily inferred from search results alone and you sometimes have to ask around to see the flaws. This can range from administrative interference (e.g. personal biases or headcanons), lack of quality editors, to the fact that people have better things to do than waste their free time attempting to fix a wiki.

Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) was an internet drama wiki that ran from 2004¹⁾ to 2011,²⁾ initially shuttering after the founder's controversial “return to form” attempt.³⁾⁴⁾ At the time, the wiki was regarded for its wealth of internet culture,⁵⁾⁶⁾ but it has since regressed into a stale,⁷⁾ unfunny shock wiki for edgy shitkids,⁸⁾ which is not helped by the fact that Know Your Meme, and even the Soyjak Wiki, has filled their niche.

Ignoring its spam of unsavory images, the wiki masks cyberstalking as trolling and its content encourages self-hatred in social rejects to foster extremist ideologies, as evidenced by their former administrators being a neo-Nazi⁹⁾ with mixed Jewish heritage¹⁰⁾ and a 2017 school shooter.¹¹⁾ It has also indirectly led to a 2018 misogynist van attack¹²⁾ and a 2022 anti-LGBT mass shooting.¹³⁾¹⁴⁾

Fandom, also known as Wikia,¹⁵⁾ is wiki hosting service founded in 2004. The overall website is bloated with excessive advertisements, most notable on mobile devices,¹⁶⁾ feeding the capitalist for-profit company recently acquired by TPG Capital in 2018.¹⁷⁾ It later acquired Curse,¹⁸⁾ GameFAQs, GameSpot, Metacritic, and TV Guide,¹⁹⁾ while also assisting the U.S. Navy in digital media advertising.²⁰⁾

Putting the corporation aside, many wikis have attempted to migrate away, but they generally disapprove of dissent, preferring to install puppet regimes,²¹⁾ tacking on a spam filter,²²⁾ and weaponizing the SEO.²³⁾ Understandably, this has been a major source of frustration, justifying a need for independent wiki alliances, like the Anti-Wikia Alliance or NIWA, and extensions like Indie Wiki Buddy.

Know Your Meme (KYM) is a wiki for memes and viral phenomenon, founded in 2007 and had ended up becoming mainstream in 2011.²⁴⁾²⁵⁾ The wiki has sullied the definition of a “meme”, which were essentially “secret online in-jokes” at the time, but it turns out that removing the “secret” and “in-joke” components have crafted this “rapid humor” ecosystem that sources its bland humor from Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, etc.

In addition, the wiki relies on a restrictive “editorship” system for every single page which severely limits the number of people allowed to edit certain articles, some galleries consist of stolen softcore pornography,²⁶⁾ political biases tend to shine in certain articles (e.g. GamerGate, Poljak), and some of their articles ironically omit or lack critical information that it was supposedly designed to combat.

“I am grateful to be here today to testify about the potential for the Wikipedia model of collaboration and information sharing which may be helpful to government operations and homeland security.”
– Jimmy Wales²⁷⁾

“Wikipedia is forced to tell a “winner's history”, which can only be based on whatever information actually made it to a reliable source. Reliable sources do not always reflect the truth.”
– Shii²⁸⁾

Wikipedia is a popular wiki that was co-founded by libertarian entrepreneurs in 2001 and managed by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation since 2003. The wiki is rather infamous for their aggressive recurring donation drives, every Wednesday and December, when they arguably don't need them^29)30)31) as they have enough money to last 20 years,³²⁾ especially when they have such a large number of benefactors.³³⁾

Despite its neutrality policy, Wikipedia isn't actually neutral as they uncritically parrot false information from western sources, understands that it isn't a reliable source, and occasionally falls into the trap of argumentum ad populum. It should never be presented as an “infallible arbitrator of truth” and, in general, you should never get your politics here.³⁴⁾ Outside of politics, it's whatever.

• The term “wiki” stems from WikiWikiWeb, the first user-editable wiki, borrowing the Hawaiian word “wiki” (lit. “fast”, “quick”) after the founder recalled the Wiki Wiki Shuttle.

• Personal wiki - A subset of wikis that are solely maintained by a single person.

• Wiki on Wikipedia
• List of Wikis on Compendium of Personal Ignorance