HandWiki - encyclopedia of general knowledge

April 19, 2024 - Reading time: 3 minutes

HandWiki stands as a wiki-style encyclopedia specialized in science, technology, computing, and general knowledge. With a focus on fostering scholarly discourse, it serves as a platform for crafting and refining articles, provided one possesses external citations and a registered login account. Beyond mere article creation, HandWiki offers a content management ecosystem, facilitating collaborative editing of original scholarly works, including books, manuals, monographs, and tutorials. These documents seamlessly integrate with HandWiki's extensive repository, linking to thousands of existing articles.

The origin of the word "HandWiki" lies in its namesake, "Handbook," with the transformation of "Book" to "Wiki" encapsulating its essence. Serving as a free, online MediaWiki-style encyclopedia, HandWiki thrives on collaborative editing, fostering a vibrant community of contributors.

HandWiki serves as a valuable alternative to Wikipedia and commercial platforms like Overleaf for real-time collaboration. It offers the flexibility for any number of users to contribute to articles and books. These wiki articles can seamlessly transition to LaTeX for publication via its LaTeX conversion feature. Handwiki:

• Provides less restrictive publishing policies, allowing articles to find a home even if rejected or altered on Wikipedia.
• Hosts more scholarly articles on specialized topics.
• Facilitates the posting of tutorials, lectures, and user manuals, leveraging standard Mediawiki formatting with internal links to HandWiki's encyclopedia articles. Authors can protect these materials using access control or grant publishing licenses to third parties.
• Supports the creation of well-organized "handbooks" on specific topics through its portal system, organized by research fields and content types. This structure aids in efficient searches within articles using namespaces and categories.
• Offers simplified editing for research and software articles compared to other general wiki-style encyclopedias. It incorporates additional syntax enhancements for inserting program codes, citations, images, and formulas. Integration with BibTeX files for referencing papers and exporting equations to LaTeX and MathML further streamlines the conversion process.
• Introduces a unique dispute resolution concept, valuing all opinions equally. Users can insert and safeguard "opinion" sections within any article.
• Supports article submissions to Encyclosphere via the "ZWI export" button in the top-right corner.

The official web page of HandWiki is https://handwiki.org

by J.Reeds