My guess is mostly it’s baserates. There exist very few wikis in the world. Many attempts at wikis get made, almost none of them take off. There are a few narrow-ish product categories where wikis reliably take off (like video games), but broader subject-specific wikis are just much rarer.
You’re making two claims here:
There exist very few wikis in the world.
This one’s just not true. There are, in fact, very many wikis in the world.
(Of course, “few” and “many” are vague terms, so you could always claim that however many wikis exist, that number is actually “very few”. But I claim that the number of wikis that a naive reader would expect there to be, if told that there are “very few” wikis in the world, is not the real number; the real number is much more like what one would expect to see if told that there are “very many” wikis in the world.)
There are a few narrow-ish product categories where wikis reliably take off (like video games), but broader subject-specific wikis are just much rarer
Is this not “broader subject-specific wikis”? If not—then what is?
It looks to me like wikis are a thing that absolutely can work, if you have a community of people with a collective interest. Of course the most common kind of collective interest around which communities form is some sort of hobby or fandom, but it’s certainly not the only kind.
Sorry, I of course meant to say here “widely-used wikis” or “successful wikis”, though I feel like it was reasonably implied from context.
The activity levels of the wikis you link do indeed vary widely. Some of them are basically dead, others seem to see lots of activity. Some examples:
Scholarpedia (one article in all of 2025):
Proteopedia (lots of activity)
Wikis are a totally useful technology! My comment was intended as a response to the OP:
How useful is a wiki for alignment? There doesn’t seem to be one now.
[...]
i’ve found that the lw wiki doesn’t work as a wikipedia-like resource, at least for me
The thing I was saying was that there exists extremely few wikis whose entries “work as a Wikipedia-like resource”, which I understood as something like “a canonical reference for those concepts that is widely assumed to be shared and gets frequently references among most people working in the field”.
Wikis mostly serve other niches. There are very few wikis whose entries become the standard way to reference something in a community or field, outside of some niche domains where they do often reach that level of common-knowledge (like fandoms).
You’re making two claims here:
This one’s just not true. There are, in fact, very many wikis in the world.
(Of course, “few” and “many” are vague terms, so you could always claim that however many wikis exist, that number is actually “very few”. But I claim that the number of wikis that a naive reader would expect there to be, if told that there are “very few” wikis in the world, is not the real number; the real number is much more like what one would expect to see if told that there are “very many” wikis in the world.)
Yes, there are wikis about video games, but also tabletop games, novel series, TV shows, movies, conservative politics, genealogy, hitchhiking, guns in movies, Islam, criticism of Islam, specific Linux distributions, proteins, peer-reviewed scholarly articles, knitting, fiction tropes, and other things…
(And that list doesn’t even include any of the innumerable wikis that are used by smaller or less-well-known communities, or (semi-)personal wikis, or private wikis…)
Is this not “broader subject-specific wikis”? If not—then what is?
It looks to me like wikis are a thing that absolutely can work, if you have a community of people with a collective interest. Of course the most common kind of collective interest around which communities form is some sort of hobby or fandom, but it’s certainly not the only kind.
Sorry, I of course meant to say here “widely-used wikis” or “successful wikis”, though I feel like it was reasonably implied from context.
The activity levels of the wikis you link do indeed vary widely. Some of them are basically dead, others seem to see lots of activity. Some examples:
Scholarpedia (one article in all of 2025):
Proteopedia (lots of activity)
Wikis are a totally useful technology! My comment was intended as a response to the OP:
The thing I was saying was that there exists extremely few wikis whose entries “work as a Wikipedia-like resource”, which I understood as something like “a canonical reference for those concepts that is widely assumed to be shared and gets frequently references among most people working in the field”.
Wikis mostly serve other niches. There are very few wikis whose entries become the standard way to reference something in a community or field, outside of some niche domains where they do often reach that level of common-knowledge (like fandoms).