Wikis have become so popular mainly because one can find information about literally anything in the universe on Wiki. There is not a single thing about which you can not find information on wiki. You can't be confident about the function of any other informative service available on the internet. The wiki services were started without much publicity but they succeeded in gaining people's faith in them.
It became more like an instinct than a task to check for information on wiki. They emerged as such a reliable service in these years that there are millions of internet users whose first reference is wikipedia, the most famous Wiki service.
The major reason for it's success is it's acceptance of information from the users. Wiki is not a ready made service. It basically is limited in content but it encourages people to add information about the topic. There might be people who know something about a topic and they add what they know to the already published content. If ten users does this, the information becomes more than enough. If you find some information about a topic today on Wiki, there might be some more content added to it if you open it tomorrow.
The choice that people could contribute their knowledge to Wiki is an instant success. People are more than happy to share their knowledge with other users and this is making Wiki a growing service every second.
The different popular services from Wiki are
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the most widely used interactive encyclopedia. You can find information about anything under the Sun on Wikipedia. You can add your knowledge about the topic to the already published content. The information found on wikipedia can be trusted blindly as it is very genuine information.
WikiHow
You get to see manuals of 'How to's on this site. All the answers to those questions which you use in you daily life can be answered on this site. You can find answer to any 'How-To' question on this site. You can also add your answers and questions to the site.
Other popular services and their contents are
* WikiTravel - travel guide for any place around the world, destination guides, hotels and resorts.
* Wiktionary - multilingual, comprehensive, user-edited dictionary. Provides word definitions, pronunciations, examples, synonyms, antonyms and translations.
* WikiBooks - A vast collection of user-edited, open-content textbooks and guides.
* CookBookWiki - dishes, recipes, cuisines and channels.
* WikiSummaries - short and quick summaries for thousands of books.
* WikiMapia - Add descriptive maps and notes to any location on the globe.
* ProductWiki - Collaborative product reviews.
* WikiCars - A guide about cars and all auto related things.
* LyricWiki - User-edited and comprehensive source for lyrics for any song from any artist.
Comments
One more for you Andrew... Check out WikiCity, which launched last week.
Hey Andrew, great article!
If you make the site-names into links, we'd have a much easier time getting to the sites. Thanks in advance! :)
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