About Wikis Github Docs

Emily Johnson

-Mar 12, 2026, 12:14 PM

You can host documentation for your repository in a wiki, so that others can use and contribute to your project. Wikis are available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. For more information, see GitHub's plans. Every repository on GitHub comes equipped with a section for hosting documentation, called a wiki. You can use your repository's wiki to share long-form content about your project, such as how to use it, how you designed it, or its core principles. A README file quickly tells what your project can do, while you can use a wiki to provide additional documentation.

For more information, see About the repository README file. With wikis, you can write content just like everywhere else on GitHub. For more information, see Getting started with writing and formatting on GitHub. We use our open-source Markup library to convert different formats into HTML, so you can choose to write in Markdown or any other supported format. You can use Markdown to add rendered math expressions, diagrams, maps, and 3D models to your wiki. For more information on creating rendered math expressions, see Writing mathematical expressions.

For more information on creating diagrams, maps and 3D models, see Creating diagrams. A GitHub wiki is a great place for your project's documentation. You can use the wiki to create, manage, and host documentation for your repository so others can use and contribute to your project. GitHub wikis are easy to start using without installing any other software. The best part is that the wiki is integrated with your GitHub repository. You do not need any other tool – you just need to know how to use markdown, as you'll use it to write your wiki.

(You can read all about that in my other article here.) You can start your GitHub wiki with just one click. Every GitHub repository has a Wiki tab in the menu at the top of the page. To start, click on it. The wiki tab is sometimes not shown by default in the GitHub repository nav bar. First, you'll need to enable wikis in your repository settings.

GitHub Wiki is a powerful tool for creating and maintaining project documentation. Whether you want to provide instructions, share knowledge or collaborate with others, a GitHub Wiki is a valuable addition to your knowledge arsenal. This step-by-step playbook walks you through the process of creating a GitHub Wiki. GitHub is a cloud-based hosting service that helps developers store and manage their code and track and control changes to their code. It's built on top of Git, a distributed version control system. With GitHub, developers can easily contribute to projects, review code, manage issues and pull requests.

It provides a centralized location for storing and sharing code, making it easier for developers to work together and maintain a history of changes. Get the latest posts delivered right to your inbox Join us for the AI Book Club, where we discuss popular books about AI and the human-in-the-loop perspective. If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All tomjoht.github.io is indexed by DeepWiki. See the tech writing blog webring: Previous | Next | Random

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through a publishing workflow with one of the most common developer platforms: GitHub. When you create a repository on GitHub, the repository comes with a wiki that you can add pages to. This wiki can be convenient if your source code is stored on GitHub. Although GitHub might not be a platform where you publish your docs, understanding how to interact with it can be important for understanding version control. Learning GitHub will allow you to become familiar with the version control workflows that are common with many docs-as-code tools. For this reason, I have a detailed tutorial for using GitHub in this course.

Regardless of whether you use GitHub as a publishing tool, this tutorial will introduce you to Git workflows with content. You could actually use the default GitHub wiki as your doc site. Here’s an example of the Basecamp API, which is housed on GitHub. Unlike other wikis, the GitHub wiki you create is its own repository that you can clone and work on locally. (If you look at the “Clone this wiki locally” link, you’ll see that it’s a separate repo from your main code repository.) You can work on files locally and then commit them to the... You can also arrange the wiki pages into a sidebar.

With GitHub, you write wiki pages in Markdown syntax. There’s a special flavor of Markdown syntax for GitHub wikis called Github-flavored Markdown, or GFM. The GitHub Flavored Markdown allows you to create tables, add classes to code blocks (for proper syntax highlighting), and more. GitHub has a wiki feature that can be enabled on a repo. This can be an easy solution for documenting contributions, plans, community info and / or documentation. Google's stance is wikis should restrict contributions to collaborators who have edit access to the repository.

IMPORTANT: If you would like your project to have a public wiki, please read the policy below and follow the steps. Public wikis on GitHub allow any GitHub account holder to edit a wiki without review. This introduces a burden on the repo owners to ensure no malicious parties alter the contents in unintended ways. For this reason, the default configuration for repos is to restrict editing to users with push access to the repo. This restriction will be managed by the OSPO engineering team. GitHub is one of the most popular remote tools for programmers and developers.

Although it is more recognized as a reliable resource for asynchronous collaborations, the Microsoft subsidiary is also a great wiki software tool. That’s why many developers know how to use GitHub as a wiki, and one of the reasons we integrated Almanac with GitHub from the start. Software companies often use the wiki section to share in-depth details about how their projects work with other software developers. But apart from that, project managers use the wiki section on Github for sharing documents related to the structure of teams and the onboarding processes of new employees. If you’re interested in learning how to use GitHub as a wiki, this article will help you get started. The word "wiki" actually originated from the word "quick" in the Hawaiian language.

According to Ward Cunningham, the father of the modern wiki, wikis mainly function as content systems for companies that want to have a broader, quicker way of distributing information. Today, wikis are used by companies and institutions for different purposes. Students in universities use it to facilitate team projects, and project managers use it to introduce important matters to employees and contractors. GitHub Wiki is an integral feature of GitHub, designed to provide collaborative documentation for software projects. It allows developers to create and manage comprehensive project documentation directly alongside their code repositories. GitHub Wiki supports Markdown for easy formatting of text, code snippets, and multimedia content, making it ideal for creating user guides, technical documentation, and project overviews.

Widely used by development teams, GitHub Wiki helps improve project transparency, facilitate knowledge sharing, and maintain up-to-date documentation, ensuring that all team members and contributors have access to essential project information. In today’s fast-paced and information-driven workplace, maintaining clear and accessible documentation is crucial. With GitHub Wiki, teams can ensure that documentation is always up-to-date and readily available, promoting efficiency, collaboration, and project success. GitHub Wiki is designed for software development teams looking to streamline their documentation process. Ideal users include: GitHub Wiki offers a range of features and functionalities that make it a powerful tool for project documentation:

There are numerous scenarios where GitHub Wiki excels. Here are some examples of how different teams and industries can benefit: In software development, creating good documentation is critical. While there are documentation services like docsify, according to my experience, the two most common choices for storing technical documentation are storing markdown files in a “docs” folder within your project’s repository and utilizing... More specifically when using GitHub, utilizing the GitHub Wiki feature. Each of these choices has pros and cons.

One way of mitigating the GitHub Wiki approach’s cons is to create a second repository that controls the wiki of the project’s repo. GitHub wikis can be pulled down to edit locally, giving us the opportunity to push to that repo. By setting up a second source to control the wiki, we introduce the option of enforcing pull requests on our documentation. This solution does have its own cons though, so it’s important to figure out what will work best for you and your team. I’ll be utilizing circleci for syncing our repos due to my familiarity with it and its ease of use. You can also use any hosted continuous integration service, such as Travis CI.

Before beginning, you or your organization will need to have signed up for circleci or your service of choice. Wikis can be forked and pulled down to edit locally in the same way the repository can. You can clone from the “wiki” tab of your repo. The following steps and accompanying video should get you on your way to this solution. YouTube embeds track user data for advertising purposes. You can watch the video on YouTube if you prefer not to grant consent for YouTube embeds.

You can host documentation for your repository in a wiki, so that others can use and contribute to your project. Wikis are available in public repositories with GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations, and in public and private repositories with GitHub Pro, GitHub Team, GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Enterprise Server. Every repository on GitHub comes equipped with a section for hosting documentation, called a wiki. You can use your repository's wiki to share long-form content about your project, such as how to use it, how you designed it, or its core principles. A README file quickly tells what your project can do, while you can use a wiki to provide additional documentation. For more information, see About the repository README file.

About Wikis Github Docs

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