A wiki is a collaborative website where multiple people can create, edit, and link pages directly in a web browser, with no coding required. Every change is saved, so the content stays current and the full edit history is recoverable. Wikipedia is the most famous example, but the same model powers internal team knowledge bases, product docs, and fan communities.
So when people ask "what is a wiki," the short answer is: a living set of web pages that a group maintains together. Instead of one author publishing a finished article, many contributors add and refine content over time. If you are evaluating one for your team, our guide on how to create a wiki walks through the setup step by step.
This post defines what a wiki is, explains how wikis work, covers the main types, shows real examples, and compares a wiki against a knowledge base and a docs site so you can pick the right tool.
What Is a Wiki, Exactly?
A wiki is a web-based platform built around open, collaborative editing. Any authorized user can add a new page, change an existing one, or link pages together. The defining trait is that editing is fast and low-friction, which is where the name comes from.
The word "wiki" comes from the Hawaiian phrase wiki wiki, meaning "quick" or "fast." Programmer Ward Cunningham coined it in 1995 when he built the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, naming it after the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus at Honolulu Airport. He wanted to capture how quickly people could publish and revise pages together.
Three features separate a wiki from an ordinary website. First, open editing: contributors change content in the browser without touching code. Second, version history: every edit is tracked and reversible. Third, heavy hyperlinking: pages connect to each other, building a web of related information rather than a flat list of documents.
Wiki vs Knowledge Base vs Docs Site
People often blur these three terms, but they solve different problems. A wiki is open and collaborative. A knowledge base is structured and curated for answers. A docs site is a polished, published reference, often customer-facing. The table below shows where each one fits.
| Feature | Wiki | Knowledge Base | Docs Site |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Collaborative editing | Self-service answers | Branded public reference |
| Who edits | Many contributors | Curators and SMEs | Writers and developers |
| Structure | Loose, link-driven | Categorized articles | Organized by version/product |
| Audience | Internal team | Customers or staff | Customers and developers |
| Editorial control | Low, open by default | Medium, reviewed | High, published intentionally |
| Typical example | Confluence, Wikipedia | Help center | API documentation |
The line between a wiki and a knowledge base is the one that confuses most teams. If you want a deeper breakdown, see our comparison of knowledge base vs wiki and the full overview of what a knowledge base is. The short version: a wiki optimizes for contribution, a knowledge base optimizes for finding the right answer fast.
How a Wiki Works
A wiki stores each page as an editable document with its own URL. When someone opens a page and clicks edit, they get a text editor, either a rich visual one or a lightweight markup syntax. They make changes, save, and the new version goes live immediately for everyone.
Behind that simplicity sits a versioning system. The wiki keeps a record of who changed what and when, so any page can roll back to an earlier state. This is what makes open editing safe: a bad edit or accidental deletion is never permanent. Most platforms also support comments, page templates, and permissions.
Linking is the connective tissue. Contributors link related pages as they write, so a reader can move from a high-level overview to a detailed procedure in one click. Over time this turns a pile of separate pages into a navigable network, which is why a mature wiki page feels more like a map than a folder.
Types of Wikis
Wikis are usually grouped by who can access and edit them. The two broad categories are public and private, which map closely to external and internal use.
- Public wiki: Open to anyone on the internet to read, and sometimes to edit. Wikipedia and Fandom communities are public wikis. They scale through crowdsourcing.
- Private wiki: Restricted to people inside an organization, usually behind a login. A company wiki or internal wiki sits here.
- Internal wiki: A private wiki used by a single team or company for handbooks, processes, and project notes. This is the most common business use.
- Personal wiki: A single-user wiki for organizing your own notes, research, and ideas with the same linking model.
An internal wiki is the workhorse for most businesses. It centralizes onboarding docs, runbooks, and policies so knowledge does not live in one person's head. Our guide to building a team wiki covers how small teams structure one without it turning into a mess.
Examples of Wikis
The best way to understand a wiki is to look at ones you already use. Most people interact with several without thinking of them as wikis at all.
- Wikipedia: The largest public wiki, a free encyclopedia edited by millions of volunteers worldwide.
- Fandom: A network of fan-maintained wikis cataloging lore for games, films, and shows.
- WikiHow: A collaborative how-to manual covering thousands of practical topics.
- GitHub Wiki: A per-repository wiki for project documentation that lives next to the code. See our breakdown of the GitHub wiki for how developers use it.
- Company intranets: Internal wikis built in tools like Confluence or Notion for handbooks and project collaboration.
Note that not every wiki has "wiki" in its name. Many modern company wikis are just labeled as the team's internal docs or knowledge space, even though they run on the same collaborative, version-controlled foundation.
Common Use Cases for a Wiki
A wiki earns its place wherever knowledge is shared by more than one person and changes often. Teams reach for one when scattered docs, stale spreadsheets, and lost Slack messages start slowing everyone down.
Typical use cases include employee onboarding handbooks, internal process and runbook documentation, project collaboration spaces, FAQ and how-to repositories, company news and announcements, and product specs shared across departments. The common thread is collaborative documentation that many people contribute to and keep current.
The payoff is real time savings. McKinsey found that employees spend nearly 20% of the workweek searching for internal information or tracking down a colleague who has it (McKinsey, The Social Economy). A well-organized wiki cuts into that lost time by giving everyone one place to look first.
When a Wiki Is Not the Right Choice
A wiki is great for messy, evolving, internal knowledge. It is a poor fit for content that needs strict accuracy, brand polish, or a clear single owner. Open editing is a strength internally and a liability when the content faces customers.
Three situations call for something other than a raw wiki. Customer-facing documentation needs consistent branding and structure that an open wiki rarely enforces. Compliance or legal content needs locked-down editing and approval, not anyone-can-change-it freedom. And API or product reference docs need versioning and a published, designed front end.
This is where a structured docs site beats a wiki. Tools like Docsio generate a branded, organized documentation site from your existing content in minutes, so you keep the collaborative drafting of a wiki but ship a polished public site. You can move messy internal notes into a clean public reference without rebuilding everything by hand using AI doc generation.
How to Create a Wiki
Starting a wiki is straightforward: pick a platform, define a simple page structure, seed it with your most-needed content, and set editing permissions. The hard part is not the setup, it is keeping it organized as it grows.
Choose a tool that matches your needs. For an internal team wiki, options like Confluence or Notion are popular, though both have tradeoffs worth weighing against alternatives. For customer-facing docs, a dedicated docs platform serves better than a general wiki. We cover the full options in our roundup of the best wiki software, and there are strong Confluence alternatives if it feels too heavy.
Whatever you pick, start small. Create a clear home page, add a handful of high-value pages, link them together, and assign a few owners to review content. A focused 20-page wiki that people trust beats a sprawling 500-page one nobody maintains.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a wiki and what is it used for?
A wiki is a collaborative website where people create, edit, and link pages together in a browser without coding. Teams use wikis for onboarding handbooks, process documentation, project collaboration, and shared FAQs. Public wikis like Wikipedia use the same model to build large, crowdsourced knowledge libraries that anyone can read.
Why is it called a wiki?
The name comes from the Hawaiian word wiki wiki, meaning "quick" or "fast." Programmer Ward Cunningham coined the term in 1995 for the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, after riding the Wiki Wiki Shuttle bus at Honolulu Airport. He chose it to capture how quickly people could publish and edit pages together.
What is an example of a wiki?
Wikipedia is the best-known example, a free encyclopedia edited by millions of volunteers. Other examples include Fandom community wikis, WikiHow, and GitHub project wikis. Inside companies, internal wikis built in tools like Confluence or Notion hold employee handbooks, runbooks, and project documentation that teams maintain together.
What is the difference between a wiki and a knowledge base?
A wiki prioritizes open, collaborative editing where many people contribute freely. A knowledge base prioritizes structured, curated articles designed to answer questions fast, usually with more editorial control. Wikis suit messy internal collaboration, while knowledge bases suit polished self-service support content for customers or staff.
Can anyone create a wiki?
Yes. Anyone can create a wiki using a hosted platform or open-source wiki software, often in minutes and with no coding. You set who can read and edit it, so a wiki can be fully public, restricted to your team, or private to one person. The main effort is organizing and maintaining the content over time.
The Bottom Line
A wiki is a collaborative, version-controlled website that a group builds and maintains together, one editable page at a time. It shines for internal knowledge that changes often and benefits from many contributors. For customer-facing content that needs polish and structure, a dedicated docs site is the stronger choice. Match the tool to the audience, and the content takes care of itself.