HandWiki:About

HandWiki - Wiki Encyclopedia of Knowledge

HandWiki is the world's largest wiki-style encyclopedia dedicated to science, technology, computing and general knowledge. It can be used to create and edit articles as long as you have external citations and login account. In addition, this is a content management environment that can be used for collaborative editing of original scholarly content, such as books, manuals, monographs and tutorials. Such documents can link thousands of existing HandWiki articles. In order to create and edit this wiki, you need to register using the top-right menu. Unregistered users can use HandWiki sandbox.

The name "HandWiki" originates from the word "Handbook", after replacing "Book" with "Wiki". HandWiki is a free online MediaWiki-style encyclopedia for collaborative editing of its content. HandWki is dedicated to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). It focuses on applications of computers, software programs and programming in different areas of science, finance and engineering.

Things You Can Do in HandWiki

HandWiki

Logo of HandWiki Encyclopedia
Screenshot HandWiki homepage, 2019
Type of site	Online encyclopedia
Available in	English
Headquarters	United States
Owner	ErmisLearn Foundation (ermislearn.org)
Created by	S.V.Chekanov
Website	https://handwiki.org
Commercial	No
Registration	Yes (Required to edit pages, via request of account)
Launched	November 20, 2019 (2019-11-20)
Current status	Active
Content license	CC BY-SA 3.0

• Search for terms using well-organized topic portals and categories.
• Improve existing scholarly articles, discuss them in the "Discussion" pages and rate articles.
• Create research articles, share them with colleagues and make your work visible on the Internet.
• Import Wikipedia draft articles if they are not accepted by the Wikipedia foundation.
• Collaborate, in real-time, on many types of documents (lectures, books, technical documents, etc.) with multiple authors. The text can only be available for a group of people working on the same project. HandWiki can be used to convert such articles to LaTeX for publications.
• Use it for education and teaching. Your text can link 2,273,695 wiki articles that already exist in HandWiki.

How It Compares with Similar Projects

HandWiki is a useful alternative to commercial Overleaf for real-time collaboration. HandWiki can be used by any number of people to write articles and books. Such wiki articles can be transformed to LaTeX for publication using the HandWiki LaTeX conversion. As an alternative to Wikipedia, HandWiki

• is less restrictive for publishing articles (see below). Wikipedia articles are typically protected by editors without easy-to-verify credentials. If your article is rejected or inappropriately modified by Wikipedia anonymous editors, bring it here.
• has more scholarly articles than Wikipedia for several specialized topics (see statistics).
• allows posting tutorials, lectures and user manuals using the standard Mediawiki formatting with links to internal HandWiki encyclopedic articles. Such materials can be protected by the authors using an access control, or have their own license for publishing by a 3rd party.
• can be used to create well organized "handbooks" on specific topics since HandWiki uses "portals" on specific topics (portal:article) for different fields of science. A portal corresponds to a certain Mediawiki "namespace". See HandWiki editing help. HandWiki is structured according to the research fields and the type of the content (i.e. "Books", "Monographs", "Manuals" etc.). This allows searches in the body of the articles using namespaces (in addition to Categories). See HandWiki search where one can select a specific topic. Wikipedia keeps all articles in the main namespace without using dedicated namespaces, therefore, finding a phrase in many thousands of unrelated articles is difficult.
• is simpler for editing research and software articles than other general wiki-style encyclopedias. It uses additional syntax enhancements (see HandWiki user's manual) for inserting program codes, citations, images and formulas. One can reference papers from uploaded BibTeX files, and export equations to the LaTeX and MathML using the mouse menu. This significantly simplifies conversions of HandWiki articles to LaTeX papers. HandWiki is designed keeping programmers in mind: It has special tags to reference documentations of Python and Java libraries.
• has a unique dispute resolution concept using the principle "All opinions matter". Users can insert and protect "opinion" sections in any article.
• can submit articles to Encyclosphere (see the top-right button "ZWI export").

How to Login

You can login (or top-right menu of all pages) to create and edit articles. If you do not have a HandWiki account, request it. While this wiki is open for editing to everyone who is registered, the HandWiki registration process checks the scientific background of the editors who want to contribute to this wiki. Our minimum requirement for the registration is at least 1 publication in a well-established peer-reviewed journal.

In order to check scientific credentials during the registration, HandWiki uses the ORCiD token from the ORCID Organization. After login to your ORCID account, you will be redirected to the HandWiki registration page. This step verifies your publication record. When scientific credentials cannot be established, HandWiki allows for alternative registration.

After first-time registration, HandWiki login will not require the ORCiD number (or login to your ORCID account). You can fully control what information can be shown in your HandWiki profile.

Note that the ORCiD number is not associated with your HandWiki account. HandWiki does not store any information (including your publication record) from the ORCID Organization.

If you are not qualified to receive the ORCiD number, you can still create articles in HandWiki sandbox from where draft articles can be moved to HandWiki by experts.

Article Acceptance Policy

We believe in the original spirit of Wikipedia - any information from scholars must have rights for publication on Wiki-style resources. Therefore, we accept all encyclopedic articles related to science, programming and computers. These articles should contain useful information and have at least one reference to an external source that supports the content of this research information. The external sources can be journal articles, preprints, arxiv.org, preprints.org (or similar), verifiable web pages and other. However, such articles should not be advertisements for any product, company or service.

Short encyclopedic HandWiki articles can be sourced from Wikipedia and similar resources. Such articles can be modified and extended. They can be put back to Wikipedia, Everipedia, and other similar public resources.

Statistics

HandWiki is the largest specialized online encyclopedias on science, technology and computing. It is the number #3 world's largest wiki among general-purpose wikis in terms of page counts. HandWiki has more articles than  English Wikipedia for many specialized topics on science, computing and software. In December 2024, HandWiki had 2,273,695 articles on various scholarly topics. In addition to the original articles submitted to this resource, research articles are sourced from the current Wikipedia (about 80% of the HandWiki content), previous versions of Wikipedia, Deletionpedia and other public (non-wiki) resources.

HandWiki article counts per topic in December 2024:

Main Topics	Nr of articles
HandWiki main pages	123
Natural and Formal Sciences
Math, Analysis, Computing	63992
Astronomy & Space	53928
Biology	500832
Chemistry	38119
Engineering & Technology	72794
Physics	20293
Earth studies	18847
Unsolved problems	5795
Humanities, Medicine, Finance
History	2406
Social studies	24794
Religion	11403
Philosophy	9486
Medicine	15259
Finance/Business	12089
Auxilary topics:
Software programs & libraries	47671
Biographies of researches	39873
Places	3745
Organizations	20210
Companies	21037

In addition, HandWiki has books, tutorials, monographs and manuals which are not included in the above summary.

Copyrights

Some articles (especially manuals and tutorials) posted on HandWiki may contain license restrictions imposed by their authors. See the HandWiki copyright statement for details. However, all encyclopedic articles derived from Wikipedia, Everipedia and other public resources must have the same license as the original articles (typically, Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0). Articles imported from Wikipedia and other resources must contain links to the original source.

History

HandWiki was created by S.V.Chekanov in October 2019 by converting much of the content of JWork.ORG wiki (2014-2016) and jHepWork wiki (2008-2014) into the MediaWiki format. The creation of HandWiki was triggered by several Limitations of Wikipedia for scholarly content.

Sponsorship Opportunities

As any software, HandWiki needs to be financially supported and maintained. It is supported via donations and membership fees that go to web services, documentation projects and user support. To ensure continuity and further development of this project, we are looking for sponsors and investors. Direct donations are also very welcome. See sponsorship opportunities and donations.

Contact Information

Please contact handwiki[AT]jwork.org for any questions related to cooperation, advertising, donations, technical support and spam removal. Requests to add or edit articles will not be processed since our technical team does not deal with article editing issues. If you need to change an article, please register and edit it. You may also use HandWiki advertising feature.