Most people have heard of wikis but many only know of the most popular one, Wikipedia. It turns out that there are several wikis and we will give you a look at the ones you may not be familiar with.

A Wiki  is a website that includes the collaboration of work from many different authors. A wiki site allows anyone to edit, delete, or modify the content on the web. Ward Cunningham created the first wiki in 1995. His WikiWikiWeb lets software developers create a library of "software patterns." The name "Wiki" was inspired by the Hawaiian word wiki or wiki-wiki, which means "quick" and is often used as a term for taxis and airport shuttles.

Wikipedia began as a complementary project for Nupedia, a free online English-language encyclopedia project whose articles were written by experts and reviewed under a formal process. Nupedia was founded 1n  2000, under the ownership of Bomis, Inc, a web portal company. Its main figures were Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger. Wikipedia was formally launched in January, 2001 by Wales and Sanger  it is currently the largest, fastest-growing, and most popular general reference work on the Internet. Wikipedia is a project that attempts to summarize all human knowledge (a huge undertaking to say the least).

Wikipedia attracts 683 million visitors annually reading over 10 million articles in 253 languages, comprising a combined total of over 1.74 billion words for all Wikipedias. The English Wikipedia edition passed the 2,000,000-article mark in September, 2007, and as of the middle of this month (July)  it had 2,458,752 articles consisting of over 1,048,000,000 words.

As we've said Wikipedia is the best known.  Wikipedia has become so large (more than a million articles) that you run across it all the time in Google. It is so popular that it is now one of the Top 100 web sites in the world! Wikipedia is published in many different languages. The top six countries that use Wikipedia are the USA = 27%: Japan = 9.8%: Germany = 7.9%: India = 4.3%: England = 4.3% and Italy = 3.9%.

Wiki Books - is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit. Wikibooks began on July of  2003, since then Wikibooks has grown to include over 30,314 pages in a multitude of textbooks created by volunteers. Simply select a topic from the list above. For example, if you select Health from the Natural Science Department above, you will be presented with a list of topics to choose from that further refines your search.

Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary. Designed as as a companion piece to Wikipedia, the encyclopedia project has grown beyond a standard dictionary and now includes a thesaurus, a rhyme guide, phrase books, language statistics and extensive appendices. Because it is a dictionary is defines items just like a regular dictionary. The difference is that it is arranged in to different sections. Thus etymologies, pronunciations, sample quotations, synonyms, antonyms and translations are included. It has several different categories as seen below.

It also has several appendices      

WikiTravel - Interesting enough there is a wiki that focuses on Travel. It is a project to create a free, complete, up-to-date, and reliable worldwide travel guide. So far there are 19,014 destination guides and other articles written and edited by Wikitravellers from around the globe. Simply select the part of the world you want (see list to the right).  This is not like a Foders where you have listings of hotels and restaurants as each city, for example, has a general description of the area, the sites, a limited list of restaurants and drinking establishments. It is a good primer of anyone looking for a good general overview of the location.

Wikimedia Commons - Wikimedia Commons is a media repository that is created and maintained  by volunteers. Its name "Wikimedia Commons" is derived from that of the umbrella project "Wikimedia" managing all Wikimedia projects and from the plural noun "commons" as its contents are shared by different language versions and different kinds of Wikimedia projects. Thus it provides a central repository for freely licensed photographs, diagrams, animations, music, spoken text, video clips, and media of all sorts that are useful for any Wikimedia project. This is a database of 3,005,102 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute. Most of the images come from library sources. Wikimedia Commons does not contain text articles like encyclopedia articles, textbooks, news, word definitions and such. Each of these other kinds of content have their own projects. a free online compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language, including sources (where known), translations of non-English quotes, and links to Wikipedia for further information! The English version of Wikiquote has 15,907 pages so far with many thousands of quotations and proverbs. There are several categories as seen below to investigate.