Overview

WikiYou is a free, open-source online encyclopedia built and maintained by its community. Entries cover companies, people, apps, games, websites, and a section of interactive tools, and are written in a neutral, third-person reference style. The site is free to read, with no account required to browse its content.

Unlike encyclopedias that run on a database-backed wiki engine, WikiYou is published as a static website. Each entry exists as a source file in a public repository and is rendered into a plain HTML page ahead of time rather than assembled on request, an approach that keeps the delivered pages lightweight and the underlying content easy to inspect. The project is maintained by Altlimit LLC.

Categories

Content on WikiYou is organized into six top-level categories, each collecting entries of a single kind:

  • Companies — Profiles of businesses and organizations.
  • People — Biographical entries.
  • Apps — Entries on software applications and online services.
  • Games — Entries on video games and related titles.
  • Websites — Entries on notable sites and web properties.
  • Tools — A section that differs from the rest of the site: instead of reference articles, it holds free interactive calculators and utilities that run entirely in the visitor's browser.

Because the tools are client-side, they execute locally in the browser rather than sending input to a server for processing. They are offered free of charge alongside the encyclopedia's written entries.

How It Is Built

WikiYou is generated with SiteGen, an open-source static site generator also maintained by Altlimit LLC. Entries are authored as source files carrying the page's text along with structured metadata — such as its title, category, and description — which the generator uses to build the finished pages, category listings, and navigation for the site.

The static output means the published site consists of ordinary HTML files. There is no server-side application rendering pages for visitors, and the full contents of the encyclopedia can be reviewed by reading the repository directly.

Contributing

The source of WikiYou is public on GitHub, and the project is open to outside contributions. Anyone may add a new entry or improve an existing one by opening a pull request against the repository, following the same process used for contributing to other open-source software projects. Proposed changes are reviewed before being merged and published to the live site.

This model places the encyclopedia's editorial history in the repository's version control record, where each change is attributable to a specific contribution and earlier revisions of an entry remain retrievable. Contributions are expected to match the site's existing conventions: factual, neutral, third-person prose consistent with the encyclopedic style used throughout its entries.