WikiAlpha is an alternative to Wikipedia, where the main difference is that our deletion policy is far more lenient with regard to notability requirements. Basically, WikiAlpha is a near-indiscriminate collection of information in the form of articles on any topic: you can create an article about the band you just started, your pet dog, yourself, your house - as long as your content does not fall under our speedy deletion policy, it will likely remain on the site forever!
As of 2022 visible at: www.nature.com/scitable
Apparently they had a separate URL as just scitable.com, so they were somewhat serious about it before shutting it down.
As of 2022 marked:RIP.
This page has been archived and is no longer updated
www.nature.com/scitable/blog/student-voices/ has last entry 2015, so presumably that's the shutdown year.
Self description:so quite related to OurBigBook.com.
Using our platform, you can customize your own eBooks for your students. Create an online classroom. Contribute and share content and connect with networks of colleagues.
Originally at github.com/zadam/trilium, then after development stopped the community took it up at: github.com/TriliumNext/Notes.
Tree based organization at last. Infinitely deep.
Amazing WYSIWYG, including maths and tables, plus insane plugins like canvas mode, and specific file formats like code/mermaid diagrams/drawing mode.
Intentionally or not, they've basically made an open source Notion, with the possible exception that Notion historically started on web and moved to the desktop, while Trillium went the other way round.
Version history with automatic snapshots at intervals. TODO how is it implemented? Do they just ZIP multiple versions?
No multiuser features. Except for that, could have been a good starting point of an online multiuser thing such as OurBigBook.com!
With Book Notes it is possible possible to see more than one page at a time on the output, which his a major feature of OurBigBook. But does it show on HTML export as well?
You can static HTML export any subtree by right clicking on it in the navigation tree.
HTML export keeps all data as HTML is their native format. This may be inherited from CKEditor. The files are mostly visible, but there is some CSS missing, it is not 100% like editor, notably math is broken. There is also a hosted way of exposing: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Sharing.
trilium.rocks however has a very good export, it is just a question of how much they had to hacked things, source at: github.com/zerebos/trilium.rocks
The default tHTML export uses frame navigation, with a toc fixed on the left frame. Efficient, but not of this century.
There is no concept of user created unique text IDs: you can have the same headers in the same folders in the UI. It's not even a matter of scopes. On exports they are differentiated as
1_name, 2_name, etc../Trilium Demo/Books/To read/1_HR.md
./Trilium Demo/Books/To read/2_HR.md
./Trilium Demo/Books/To read/HR.mdMarkdown export warns:
this preserves most of the formatting
Architecture: runs on local SQLite database via better-sqlite3. Data apparently stored in SQLite database at
~/.local/share/trilium-data, no raw files.Markup is stored as HTML as seen from:
sqlite3 document.db 'SELECT * from note_contents'. HTML is their native storage format, quite interesting. But this means it is not source centric, so any source editing would have to go via import/export. It can be done apparently: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Markdown but involves shoving a ZIP around.WYSIWYG based on ckeditor.com/ which is a dependency. It is kind of cool that the view in which you view the output is exactly the same as the one you edit in, and there is no intermediate format, just the HTML.
Math is KaTeX based.
It also runs on the browser via a server: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/Server-installation. And they have a paid service for it at: trilium.cc/. Quite impressive.
They have server to from desktop sync: github.com/zadam/trilium/wiki/synchronization. There is no conflict resolution, one of them wins randomly. But they have revision history, and anything lost will be in the revision history. They have so many features it is mind blowing.
Maintainer announced he would be slowing down development since January 2024: github.com/zadam/trilium/issues/4620?ref=selfh.st
Why Wikipedia sucks: Section "Wikipedia".
Best languages:
The most important page of Wikipedia is undoubtedly: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources which lists the accepted and non accepted sources. Basically, the decision of what is true in this world.
Wikipedia is incredibly picky about copyright. E.g.: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_of_all_fair_use_images_of_living_people because "such portrait could be created". Yes, with a time machine, no problem! This does more harm than good... excessive!
Citing in Wikipedia is painful. Partly because of they have a billion different templates that you have to navigate. They should really have a system where you can easily reuse existing sources across articles! Section "How to use a single source multiple times in a Wikipedia article?"
- youtu.be/_Rt0eAPLDkM?t=113 encyclopedia correction stickers. OMG!
- youtu.be/_Rt0eAPLDkM?t=201 Jimmy was a moderator on MUD games
Inside the Wikimedia Foundation offices by Wikimedia Foundation (2008)
Source. Some examples by Ciro Santilli follow.
Of the tutorial-subjectivity type:
- This edit perfectly summarizes how Ciro feels about Wikipedia (no particular hate towards that user, he was a teacher at the prestigious Pierre and Marie Curie University and actually as a wiki page about him):which removed the only diagram that was actually understandable to non-Mathematicians, which Ciro Santilli had created, and received many upvotes at: math.stackexchange.com/questions/776039/intuition-behind-normal-subgroups/3732426#3732426. The removal does not generate any notifications to you unless you follow the page which would lead to infinite noise, and is extremely difficult to find out how to contact the other person. The removal justification is even somewhat ad hominem: how does he know Ciro Santilli is also not a professional Mathematician? :-) Maybe it is obvious because Ciro explains in a way that is understandable. Also removal makes no effort to contact original author. Of course, this is caused by the fact that there must also have been a bunch of useless edits not done by Ciro, and there is no reputation system to see if you should ignore a person or not immediately, so removal author has no patience anymore. This is what makes it impossible to contribute to Wikipedia: your stuff gets deleted at any time, and you don't know how to appeal it. Ciro is going to regret having written this rant after Daniel replies and shows the diagram is crap. But that would be better than not getting a reply and not learning that the diagram is crap.
rm a cryptic diagram (not understandable by a professional mathematician, without further explanations
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Finite_field&type=revision&diff=1044934168&oldid=1044905041 on finite fields with edit comment "Obviously: X ≡ α". Discussion at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Finite_field#Concrete_simple_worked_out_example Some people simply don't know how to explain things to beginners, or don't think Wikipedia is where it should be done. One simply can't waste time fighting off those people, writing good tutorials is hard enough in itself without that fight.
- en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&diff=1193622235&oldid=1193529573 by user Bob K. removed Ciro Santilli's awesome simple image of the Discrete Fourier transform as seen at en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Discrete_Fourier_transform&oldid=1176616763:with message:
Hello. I am a retired electrical engineer, living near Washington,DC. Most of my contributions are in the area of DSP, where I have about 40 years of experience in applications on many different processors and architectures.
Thank you so much!!remove non-helpful image
Maybe it is a common thread that these old "experts" keep removing anything that is actually intelligible by beginners? Section "There is value in tutorials written by beginners"Also ranted at: x.com/cirosantilli/status/1808862417566290252
Figure 1. Source at: numpy/fft_plot.py. - when Ciro Santilli created Scott Hassan's page, he originally included mentions of his saucy divorce: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scott_Hassan&oldid=1091706391 These were reverted by Scott's puppets three times, and Ciro and two other editors fought back. Finally, Ciro understood that Hassan's puppets were likely right about the removal because you can't talk about private matters of someone who is low profile:even if it is published in well known and reliable publications like the bloody New York Times. In this case, it is clear that most people wanted to see this information summarized on Wikipedia since others fought back Hassan's puppet. This is therefore a failure of Wikipedia to show what the people actually want to read about.This case is similar to the PsiQuantum one. Something is extremely well known in an important niche, and many people want to read about it. But because the average person does not know about this important subject, and you are limited about what you can write about it or not, thus hurting the people who want to know about it.
Notability constraints, which are are way too strict:There are even a Wikis that were created to remove notability constraints: Wiki without notability requirements.
- even information about important companies can be disputed. E.g. once Ciro Santilli tried to create a page for PsiQuantum, a startup with $650m in funding, and there was a deletion proposal because it did not contain verifiable sources not linked directly to information provided by the company itself: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/PsiQuantum Although this argument is correct, it is also true about 90% of everything that is on Wikipedia about any company. Where else can you get any information about a B2B company? Their clients are not going to say anything. Lawsuits and scandals are kind of the only possible source... In that case, the page was deleted with 2 votes against vs 3 votes for deletion.is very similar to Stack Exchange's own Stack Overflow content deletion issues. Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. "Ain't Nobody Got Time for That" actually has a Wiki page: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ain%27t_Nobody_Got_Time_for_That. That's notable. Unlike a $600M+ company of course.
should we delete this extremely likely useful/correct content or not according to this extremely complex system of guidelines"
In December 2023 the page was re-created, and seemed to stick: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PsiQuantum#Secondary_sources It's just a random going back and forth. Author Ctjk has an interesting background:I am a legal official at a major government antitrust agency. The only plausible connection is we regulate tech firms
For these reasons reason why Ciro basically only contributes images to Wikipedia: because they are either all in or all out, and you can determine which one of them it is. And this allows images to be more attributable, so people can actually see that it was Ciro that created a given amazing image, thus overcoming Wikipedia's lack of reputation system a little bit as well.
Wikipedia is perfect for things like biographies, geography, or history, which have a much more defined and subjective expository order. But when it comes to "tutorials of how to actually do stuff", which is what mathematics and physics are basically about, Wikipedia has a very hard time to go beyond dry definitions which are only useful for people who already half know the stuff. But to learn from zero, newbies need tutorials with intuition and examples.
Bibliography:
- gwern.net/inclusionism from gwern.net:
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
- Quote "Golden wiki vs Deletionism on Wikipedia"
Per-table dumps created with mysqldump and listed at: dumps.wikimedia.org/. Most notably, for the English Wikipedia: dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/
A few of the files are not actual tables but derived data, notably dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-all-titles-in-ns0.gz from Download titles of all Wikipedia articles
The tables are "documented" under: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_layout, e.g. the central "page" table: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Page_table. But in many cases it is impossible to deduce what fields are from those docs.
dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-category.sql.gz contains a list of categories. It only contains the categories and some counts, but it doesn't contain the subcategories and pages under each category, so it is a bit pointless.
The schema is listed at: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Category_table
The SQL first defines the table:followed by a few humongous inserts:which we can see at: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices
CREATE TABLE `category` (
`cat_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`cat_title` varbinary(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`cat_pages` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
`cat_subcats` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
`cat_files` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
PRIMARY KEY (`cat_id`),
UNIQUE KEY `cat_title` (`cat_title`),
KEY `cat_pages` (`cat_pages`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB AUTO_INCREMENT=249228235 DEFAULT CHARSET=binary ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;INSERT INTO `category` VALUES (2,'Unprintworthy_redirects',1597224,20,0),(3,'Computer_storage_devices',88,11,0)Se see that en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices_by_companyso it contains only categories.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices is a subcategory of that category and it appears in that file.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronis_Secure_Zone is a page of the category, and it does not appear
We can check this with:and it shows:There doesn't seem to be any interlink between the categories, only page and subcategory counts therefore.
sed -s 's/),/\n/g' enwiki-latest-category.sql | grep Computer_storage_devices(3,'Computer_storage_devices',88,11,0
(521773,'Computer_storage_devices_by_company',6,6,0The schema is listed at: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Categorylinks_table
On the SQL:
CREATE TABLE `categorylinks` (
`cl_from` int(8) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT 0,
`cl_to` varbinary(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`cl_sortkey` varbinary(230) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`cl_timestamp` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT current_timestamp() ON UPDATE current_timestamp(),
`cl_sortkey_prefix` varbinary(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`cl_collation` varbinary(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`cl_type` enum('page','subcat','file') NOT NULL DEFAULT 'page',
PRIMARY KEY (`cl_from`,`cl_to`),
KEY `cl_timestamp` (`cl_to`,`cl_timestamp`),
KEY `cl_sortkey` (`cl_to`,`cl_type`,`cl_sortkey`,`cl_from`),
KEY `cl_collation_ext` (`cl_collation`,`cl_to`,`cl_type`,`cl_from`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=binary ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;The format appears to be described at: www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Categorylinks_table
A sample INSERT entry is:
(3,'Computer_storage_devices',88,11,0)dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiki/latest/enwiki-latest-all-titles-in-ns0.gz Characterization:
- contains redirects, e.g. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/"Ampere_North" redirects to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampere_North,_New_Jersey and both are present. Noted in this comment: stackoverflow.com/questions/24474288/how-to-obtain-a-list-of-titles-of-all-wikipedia-articles#comment136016773_24474476
Our WIP script: wikipedia/import-categories.sh.
Related:
- opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/1533/download-wikipedia-articles-from-a-specific-category
- webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/16359/is-there-a-way-to-download-a-list-of-all-wikipedia-categories/172480#172480
- stackoverflow.com/questions/40119322/how-to-download-all-pages-inside-a-category-in-wikipedia
- category tree on Stack Overflow
- stackoverflow.com/questions/17432254/wikipedia-category-hierarchy-from-dumps/77313490#77313490 Canon but no good answers.
- stackoverflow.com/questions/12227134/how-to-fetch-category-tree-of-wiki
- stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t. Actually explains it: stackoverflow.com/questions/21782410/finding-subcategories-of-a-wikipedia-category-using-category-and-categorylinks-t/21798259#21798259
- stackoverflow.com/questions/27279649/how-to-build-wikipedia-category-hierarchy
- mdkzaman.com/knowledge-graph-from-wikipedia-category-hierarchy/
Consider:
Let's observe them in MySQL:outputs:
mysql enwiki -e "select page_id, page_namespace, page_title, page_is_redirect from page where page_namespace in (0, 14) and page_title in ('Computer_storage_devices', 'Computer_data_storage')"+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| page_id | page_namespace | page_title | page_is_redirect |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+
| 5300 | 0 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 42371130 | 0 | Computer_storage_devices | 1 |
| 711721 | 14 | Computer_data_storage | 0 |
| 895945 | 14 | Computer_storage_devices | 0 |
+----------+----------------+--------------------------+------------------+mysql enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to from categorylinks where cl_from in (5300, 711721, 895945, 42371130)"+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| cl_from | cl_to |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| 5300 | All_articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2009 |
| 5300 | Articles_containing_potentially_dated_statements_from_2011 |
| 5300 | Articles_with_GND_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_NKC_identifiers |
| 5300 | Articles_with_short_description |
| 5300 | Computer_architecture |
| 5300 | Computer_data_storage |
| 5300 | Short_description_matches_Wikidata |
| 5300 | Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020 |
| 5300 | Wikipedia_articles_incorporating_text_from_the_Federal_Standard_1037C |
| 711721 | Computer_architecture |
| 711721 | Computer_data |
| 711721 | Computer_hardware_by_type |
| 711721 | Data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_data_storage |
| 895945 | Computer_peripherals |
| 895945 | Recording_devices |
| 42371130 | Redirects_from_alternative_names |
+----------+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+So we see that
cl_from encodes the parent categories:- parent categories of categories:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
711721, has parent categories: "Computer hardware by type", "Computer data", "Data storage", "Computer architecture". This matches exactly on the database. These are all encoded on the source code of the page:{{DEFAULTSORT:Storage}} [[Category:Computer hardware by type]] [[Category:Computer data|Storage]] [[Category:Data storage|Computer]] [[Category:Computer architecture]] - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_storage_devices has parent categories: "Computer data storage", "Recording devices", "Computer peripherals". This matches exactly on the database.
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_data_storage, which has ID
- parent categories of pages:
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_storage_devices whish is a redirect gets the magic category "Redirects_from_alternative_names", a humongous placeholder with many thousands of pages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Redirects_from_alternative_names
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_data_storage shows only two categories onthe web UI: "Computer data storage" and "Computer architecture". Both of these are present on the database and at the end of the source code:The others appear to be more magic. Two of them we can guess from the templates:
{{DEFAULTSORT:Computer Data Storage}} [[Category:Computer data storage| ]] [[Category:Computer architecture]]are likely{{short description|Storage of digital data readable by computers}} {{Use dmy dates|date=June 2020}}Use_dmy_dates_from_June_2020andArticles_with_short_descriptionbut the rest is more magic and not necessarily present in-source.
So to find all articls and categories under a given category title, say en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mathematics we can run:
mariadb enwiki -e "select cl_from, cl_to, page_namespace, page_title from categorylinks inner join page on page_namespace in (0, 14) and cl_from = page_id and cl_to = 'Mathematics'" How to use a single source multiple times in a Wikipedia article? by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Footnotes#Footnotes:_using_a_source_more_than_once gives the following method:
Definition, anywhere on article, likely ideally as the first usage:
<ref name="myname">{{cite web ...}}</ref>And then you can use it later on as:which automatically expands the exact same thing, or using the shortcut:
<ref name="myname" />{{r|myname}}To cite multiple pages of a book: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Citing_multiple_pages_of_the_same_source, the best method is to define and use the reference without adding the Do not set the page in or for multiple pages:
p or location in cite as:<ref name="googleStory">{{cite book |title=The Google Story}}</ref>{{rp|p=123}}cite, otherwise it shows up on the references. Instead we use the {{rp}} template. And then use the reference with the {{r}} template as:{{r|googleStory|p=456}}{{r|googleStory|pp=123, 156-158}} Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact