Top 6 Wikipedia Alternatives You Should Know About in 2025
May 13, 2025 - Reading time: 5 minutes
As of 2025, Wikipedia remains the world's largest information resource, maintained by communities of volunteers. In recent years, however, it has become increasingly restrictive, marked by a lack of meaningful community engagement, systemic biases, and tight control by users with administrative privileges.
However, there are also plenty of alternative wiki-style encyclopedias that follow somewhat different publication strategies. Other encyclopedic resources are usually smaller in size, but they are typically focused on specific areas of expertise. These are often managed by non-profit organizations or individuals with significant knowledge in their respective fields. In many cases, they also follow alternative content publication policies and have established dispute resolution mechanisms -both of which have become increasingly important for resources edited by large communities of experts.
In this article we will discuss wiki-style encyclopedias with free content (i.e. licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License or similar licenses), which can be edited by everyone who can login to these resources. We do not discuss, for example, Britannica, which is another great resource. It has a more restrictive license, plus it is behind a paywall.
Here are the five free Wikipedia alternatives to consider in 2025:
Justapedia - general topics;
HandWiki - science, technology, computing and general knowledge;
Citizendium - general topics;
MDWiki - medical content;
WikiDoc - another medical encyclopedia;
Encyclopedia of life - biology related entries.
Below we will discuss these five online free encyclopedias in more details.
Justapedia (justapedia.org)
Justapedia, operated by the Justapedia Foundation, is an English-language encyclopedia established in response to what its founders view as increasingly restrictive and biased editorial policies on Wikipedia. Created with a strong emphasis on free speech and minimizing censorship, Justapedia aims to provide broader perspectives, particularly on controversial or politically sensitive topics.One of Justapedia's goals is to preserve articles that have been deleted from Wikipedia, especially when such deletions are perceived to reflect editorial bias. These restored articles highlight the importance of impartiality and objectivity in encyclopedic content.Unlike Wikipedia, registered users on Justapedia are allowed to create new articles, supporting a more open and inclusive approach to knowledge sharing.
HandWiki (handwiki.org)
Probably, this is the biggest rival of Wikipedia and Justapedia in terms of the number of articles. In 2025, this encyclopedia had more than one million articles. Although it includes many articles from Wikipedia and other free online resources (with the proper attribution to original sources), the sheer number of non-Wikipedia articles is impressive. HandWiki's entries look "cleaner" than Wikipedia's articles, but most importantly, they are organized in 17 topics ("namespaces"). This helps navigation in different subjects. Recent reports posted on the Handwiki FAQs page suggest that HandWiki articles are generally larger in size and contain more citations than comparable Wikipedia entries. This is likely due to HandWiki's less restrictive content acceptance policy, which allows for more. This encyclopedia does not include topics related to art, movies and music.
Unlike Wikipedia, anonymous logins are not allowed: HandWiki can be edited by registered users with verified professional credentials.
Citizendium (citizendium.org)
This platform is considered a sister site to Wikipedia, as it was created by one of Wikipedia's co-founders, Larry Sanger. Unlike Wikipedia, Citizendium incorporates a more structured peer review process, including features such as 'citable certifications' and disclaimers on articles that have not yet undergone sufficient review. Additionally, all contributors are required to register using their real names rather than anonymous usernames. At the time, the overlap with Wikipedia content remains relatively limited, offering alternative perspectives on a range of topics.
Unlike Wikipedia, anonymous logins are not allowed.
MDWiki (mdwiki.org)
The goal of MDWiki is to provide reliable, comprehensive, up-to-date education resources and information in the biomedical and related social sciences freely available to all people. MDWiki's content efforts involve further developing Wikipedia's medical content. The encyclopedia is maintained by Wiki Project Med Foundation, with the effort to distribute offline medal content. We found that MDWiki does contain unique articles which are hard to find in Wikipedia. In particle, we appreciate various medical tables extracted from scientific journals, which are formatted in the wiki style.
WikiDoc (wikidoc.org)
WikiDoc is another open-source platform that enables an international community of healthcare professionals to collaboratively create and edit medical content in a process known as co-creation. It is specifically designed to support collaborative authoring. WikiDoc is open to a broad contributor base, and its articles are free from copyright restrictions. The platform is less susceptible to bias, difficult for any single group to censor, and highly responsive to new information. Articles on WikiDoc are written by consensus-so over time, through successive editorial revisions, most viewpoints tend to reach a balanced representation.
Encyclopedia of life (eol.org)
If you're interested in knowledge about life on Earth, the Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is a great resource to explore. According to its official website, EOL's main mission is to increase awareness and understanding of the natural world by gathering, generating, and sharing knowledge through an open, freely accessible, and trusted digital encyclopedia. The platform is substantial in size and features extensive image collections of various species-some of which have been incorporated into Wikipedia articles. However, some entries on EOL are noticeably shorter compared to those found on HandWiki and Wikipedia.
Encyclosphere (EncycloReader.org & EncycloSearch.org)
No matter which encyclopedia you prefer, you can access those mentioned above—as well as many others not listed here — through the web portals EncycloReader.org and EncycloSearch.org. Both platforms are part of the EncycloSphere network, which is supported by the Knowledge Standards Foundation (KSF). One of the key figures behind this initiative was Dr. Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia and current president of the KSF.
EncycloReader and EncycloSearch are designed to search and display content from multiple online encyclopedias using a unified presentation format. Even if you can’t find your favorite article on Wikipedia or the six wiki-based encyclopedias discussed above, there’s a high chance it can be found within the EncycloSphere network, which brings together around 30 online encyclopedias under a common presentation standard. EncycloReader’s search results are free from ads and immune to manipulation by search engine optimization (SEO) tactics, ensuring decentralized, unbiased, and content-focused access to information.
by S.Chekanov (KSF), May 13, 2025