HandWiki

HandWiki

Logo of HandWiki Encyclopedia
Screenshot HandWiki homepage, 2019
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	English
Headquarters	United States
Owner	Knowledge Media Foundation (KMF) (since 2026)
Created by	S.V.Chekanov
Website	https://handwiki.org/
Alexa rank	120,000 global
Commercial	No
Registration	Yes (Required to edit pages, via request of account)
Launched	Oct 20, 2019
Current status	Active
Content license	CC BY-SA 3.0

HandWiki is an internet Wiki-style encyclopedia for professional researchers in various branches of science and computer science. As other Wiki type encyclopedias, HandWiki is designed for collaborative editing of articles.

Unlike the traditional Wikipedia that uses the categories concept for all articles located in the main namespace, HandWiki uses dedicated namespaces for each topic. This allows creation of "Books" or "Manual" by grouping articles under the same namespace. According to the Handwiki designers, this can simplify organization of articles according to particular topic. HandWiki has the following topics included in the dedicated namespaces: Mathematics, Data Science, Physics, Biology, Astronomy, Art, Chemistry, Philosophy, Computer Concepts, Social Studies, Medicine, Religion, Earth, Places, Engineering, History, Companies, Organizations, and Biographies.

One notable feature of HandWiki is that it allows to collaborate in real-time on many types of documents (lectures, books, technical documents, etc.) with multiple authors. The text can be protected from viewing, and can only be available for groups of people working on the same project. HandWiki can be used to convert such articles to LaTeX and to use BibTeX for referencing. These two features are a significant advantage for preparing research articles for publication.

The HandWiki is designed using the MediaWiki software with additional extensions for inclusion of references to programming codes and BibTeX citations. Handwiki allows adding advertisements to the end of the articles. The advertising icons can be grouped according to the HandWiki topics.

HandWiki registration policy

Unlike Wikipedia, HandWiki does not allow anonymous editing. This is necessary for ensuring high quality of articles since the notability concept used for Wikipedia articles is removed. Login to HandWiki is restricted to professional researchers after indicating an evidence of their qualifications. This is achieved by imposing the requirement that the HandWiki users should have at least one publication in peer-reviewed journals. On the technical side, this is enforced through providing the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) number during the registration, which uniquely identifies scientific and other academic authors and contributors. As an alternative, a researcher can send an email to the support team indicating his/her published research article. HandWiki is supported via donations and membership fees that go to web services, documentation projects and user support.

Licenses of HandWiki articles

According to the HandWiki documentation , the registered users can create manuals and tutorials using different types of licenses. In particular, some articles (especially manuals and tutorials) posted on HandWiki may contain license restrictions imposed by their authors. However, all encyclopedic articles derived from Wikipedia, Everipedia and other public resources must have the same license as the original articles (typically, Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0). Articles imported from Wikipedia and other resources must contain links to the original source.

Technical features

Here is a list of notable technical features of HandWiki:

• HandWiki organizes articles independently in topical portals ("namespaces") and categories, while Wikipedia organizes articles in categories only. This mitigates the problem of similar article titles for different topics, and removes Wikipedia's disambiguation . As the result, navigation in HandWiki is significantly simpler (and faster) than in Wikipedia.
• Improved search engine (faster speed plus navigation in different namespaces)
• Typing a word in the search window automatically suggests topics (see the top search bar)
• HandWiki suggests existing articles when creating internal links
• LaTeX friendly. One can cite articles using uploaded BibTeX files or importing citations from ArXiv.org
• To encourage content sharing, HandWiki articles can be exported to ZWI files with Mediawiki, DokuWiki, LaTeX and HTML article versions (together with all images).
• Code highlighting and equation parsing are done by JavaScript.
• Uses MathJax that allows exporting equations and chemical formulas to the MathML and LaTeX format (see Help)
• Integration with programming languages (Java and Python classes can be referenced inside articles)
• Registered users can rate articles (in the scale from 1 to 5 stars)
• External URL to define terms are allowed (unlike the traditional Wikipedia)

HandWiki supports Wikipedia templates, but only those which are best maintained (and used for more than 5 articles).

HandWiki is designed to place advertisements to cover the maintenance cost. The advertising matches the topic of the HandWiki portals. For the best reading experience of the articles, the advertising is located at the bottom of the articles.

Article acceptance policy

HandWiki covers topics related to science, finance, and computing, with the exception of politics and sports. Links that reference such topics may point to external articles from Wikipedia, Everipedia, and Citizendium. Book-related topics are supported if they are relevant to education and research.

As of 2026, the following topical portals are supported: Mathematics, Data Science, Physics, Biology, Astronomy, Art, Chemistry, Philosophy, Computer Concepts, Social Studies, Medicine, Religion, Earth, Places, Engineering, History, Companies, Organizations, and Biographies.

In addition, users may create books, monographs, and tutorials, provided they use their real names. The Unknown category is dedicated to unusual observations and unsolved problems that are not well incorporated into mainstream knowledge.

HandWiki, in its original form, has a more permissive policy for accepting articles than Wikipedia. In particular, it does not enforce the Wikipedia notability guidelines for scholarly content. The quality of submitted articles is maintained by verifying the scholarly qualifications of editors during registration. Technically, this is checked via the ORCID identifiers of editors. As a result of this policy, the importance of the notability concept — which is compulsory for Wikipedia articles created by anonymous editors—is reduced, along with the dependence on paid "third-party" reviews.

There is one important requirement for article submissions to HandWiki: the submitted article must include at least one reference to an external source, without a strict specification of the nature of that source. HandWiki does not have a superuser or administrator responsible for removing articles based on their content. The main idea behind this decision is that articles submitted by researchers will be sufficiently scrutinized by other researchers, and that errors and scientific rigor can be evaluated through collaborative discussions among qualified contributors.

Dispute resolution

HandWiki articles are created through consensus of all users. Unlike other wiki encyclopedias, HandWiki does not have super-users who resolve disputes and create final versions of articles. After an article is created, it can be added to the "Watch list" (see the blue star at the top panel). In this case an email will be sent to the author about changes by other users. If the editors disagree, they can discuss articles in the "Discussion" page. In addition, authors can add their names directly at the bottom of articles using Author template, in which case the name always shown at the bottom of articles.

HandWiki provisions a mechanism for dealing with different opinions without resolving them by editors with administrative privileges. When a consensus is impossible, specially designed sections are used to express alternative opinions. Such sections will be embedded automatically in the body of the article, creating a well-formatted content extending the article. The sections without consensus can be edit-protected by persons who have alternative opinions. The protected sections will require verified name of the contributor. The editor name who created such sections will be automatically indicated at the top header of such boxes. A vote will be added to indicate the popularity of this opinion.

History

HandWiki was first announced in October 2019 as a research encyclopedia for data science. The creation of HandWiki was triggered by several Limitations of Wikipedia for scholarly content. The main motivation was to mitigate Wikipedia's deletionism for scholarly content, thus acknowledging the problem with the Wikipedia notability for wiki-style public resources that expose scientific knowledge (see also the article "Criticism of Wikipedia"). In October 2019, the project was carried out under the auspices of the members of the jWork portal led by S.V.Chekanov, who also set the policy for contributed articles. In October 2019, all HandWiki articles were original articles imported from the jWork.org Wiki, that had several thousand articles at that time.

The technical aspect of HandWiki was executed by S.Chekanov in 2019 following the standard data analysis principles . In order to provide internal links for specific terms of the original jWork.org articles, a software algorithm was developed that analyzed the wiki text and imported the required definitions from Wikipedia articles. Later this algorithm was improved and dedicated namespaces were created. The algorithm that populates HandWiki from external sources and makes editorial changes was significantly improved by S.Chekanov during 2020. He also introduced several technical innovations for the Mediawiki software, such as a citation database that uses BibTeX and ArXiv.org, export to the ZWI file format, fast Mediawiki search engine (proprietorial). Some technical work related to HandWiki was carried out following discussions with Larry Sanger (co-founder of Wikipedia), Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF) and Encyclosphere which have the goal of decentralizing the encyclopedic content of the Internet.

Since 2026, HandWiki is supported by the Knowledge Media Foundation (KMF), which is a non-for profit organization to support decentralizing web access to knowledge-based information. S.V.Chekanov was one of the founders and a member of the board of the directors.

Statistics

HandWiki is one of the largest specialized online encyclopedias on knowledge-related topics. It is the #3 largest wiki in the world in terms of page count. HandWiki has more articles than  English Wikipedia for many specialized topics in science, computing, and software.

In May 2026, HandWiki had 2,409,210 pages on various scholarly topics. This count includes images. The actual number of articles is roughly 1.1 million (as of 2026).

In addition to original articles submitted to this resource, research articles are sourced from the current Wikipedia (about 80% of HandWiki content), previous versions of Wikipedia, Deletionpedia, and other public (non-wiki) resources. Most articles, unless stated otherwise, are licensed under the standard Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License. Many articles are imported from the current version of Wikipedia, as indicated in the footnotes attached to such articles. Studies estimating the number of articles dedicated to data science indicate that the total number of articles about software packages in HandWiki is about 10% larger than in Wikipedia.

HandWiki articles are synchronized with Wikipedia, while giving preference to local edits by registered users. The articles have been reformatted by removing some standard Wikipedia templates, and all internal references have been redesigned to include articles from different HandWiki namespaces. A fraction of articles was imported from previous versions of Wikipedia. HandWiki attempts to preserve Wikipedia articles that were rejected by Wikipedia editors due to issues with notability. In particular, HandWiki includes research articles from Deletionpedia and Wikipedia archive dumps.

In August 2020, about 15,200 scholarly articles permanently removed from Wikipedia in 2018–2019 were restored by the HandWiki team. In 2018 and 2019, such articles did not meet Wikipedia's notability guidelines. HandWiki also includes original research articles and content from other public resources after conversion to the MediaWiki format.

HandWiki documentation advises resubmitting HandWiki articles edited by professional researchers back to Wikipedia after they have been sufficiently reviewed on HandWiki, so they can be incorporated in accordance with Wikipedia policy.

External links

• Official website