indie-wiki-buddy: Open Source Documentation & Knowledge Base

What is indie-wiki-buddy?

Indie Wiki Buddy is a free, MIT-licensed browser extension for Firefox and Chrome that automatically notifies readers when a wiki page is hosted on a large, corporate-run wiki farm and redirects them to the independent wiki covering the same subject.

What it is

Indie Wiki Buddy is a JavaScript browser extension that lives in the Content & Publishing / Documentation & Knowledge Base category. Once installed in Firefox or Chrome, it watches the pages a reader opens, checks them against maintained lists of wiki sites, and either warns that a better independent source exists or sends the reader straight there. The extension is the client; the site lists it consults are held separately in the IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy-data repository, so coverage can grow without shipping a new extension build.

The concrete problem it solves is accidental traffic to corporate wiki farms. Readers who follow a search result or an old bookmark often land on a farm-hosted copy of a subject without knowing an independent, community-run wiki exists. Indie Wiki Buddy replaces that default navigation habit with an automatic notice and redirect, and it does so for many language communities at once rather than relying on each reader to remember the correct alternative domain.

Key capabilities

Notifies the reader, and optionally redirects, when a visited wiki sits on a large, corporate-run wiki farm and an independent equivalent is known.
Ships per-language site lists held as JSON, including data/sitesEN.json, data/sitesCA.json, data/sitesDE.json, data/sitesES.json, data/sitesFI.json, data/sitesFR.json, data/sitesHR.json, data/sitesHU.json, data/sitesIT.json, data/sitesJA.json, data/sitesKO.json, data/sitesLZH.json, data/sitesNL.json, data/sitesPL.json, data/sitesPT.json, data/sitesRU.json, data/sitesSV.json, and data/sitesTH.json.
Keeps the redirect data in a separate indie-wiki-buddy-data repository, so site coverage is maintained independently of the extension code.
Published for Firefox on addons.mozilla.org and for Chrome on the Chrome Web Store under extension ID fkagelmloambgokoeokbpihmgpkbgbfm.
Distributed under the MIT licence with a JavaScript codebase, so forks and local builds are permitted.
Tagged with the hacktoberfest, wiki, and extension topics, signalling open contribution to both the extension and its data.

Who uses it and how

Readers who follow wiki links from search engines, forums, or bookmarks and want to end up on the independent copy without checking by hand.
Multilingual wiki communities: the shipped data covers eighteen language lists, from English, German, French, and Spanish through to Catalan, Croatian, Hungarian, Finnish, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, and Literary Chinese.
Contributors taking part in Hacktoberfest, who can add or correct site entries in the data repository rather than changing extension code.
Developers and tinkerers: with 536 stars and 157 forks, the project has a base of users who build and maintain their own variants from the source.

Getting started

Install the extension from the Firefox Add-ons listing or the Chrome Web Store listing for Indie Wiki Buddy. The project homepage at https://getindie.wiki carries the download links and further detail.

How it compares

No comparable or paid products are named in the available facts, so Indie Wiki Buddy stands alone in this registry. The nearest description available is its own tagline: an extension that notifies and redirects readers to independent wikis.

When to use it — and when not to

Because it is a client-side browser extension, a self-hoster operates no database, storage, or mail service; installation is the whole deployment, and the trade-off is that behaviour is confined to the browsers where it is installed and to the sites present in the language JSON files. Readers of wikis outside those lists gain nothing, and anyone who wants server-side or organisation-wide enforcement will not get it here. Honest weaknesses in the facts: 87 open issues are recorded, the README excerpt is brief and mostly links, and much of the configuration and behaviour documentation therefore lives off-repository at getindie.wiki.

project readme (upstream, from github) — read inline

Indie Wiki Buddy

Indie Wiki Buddy is a browser extension that automatically notifies and redirects you from wikis on large, corporate-run wiki farms to independent wikis.

Large, corporate-run wiki farms have enabled hundreds of great wikis and communities. Unfortunately, these wiki farms can easily overshadow quality independent wikis, especially in search engine results. Independent wikis often have the benefit of greater self-determination and fewer ads, but are easily missed by users who aren't aware of their existence.

When visiting a wiki on a large corporate wiki farm such as Fandom, Indie Wiki Buddy will notify and/or automatically redirect you if a quality, independent alternative is available. You can customize your experience per-wiki.

In addition, search results in Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Ecosia, Kagi, Qwant, Startpage, Yahoo!, and Yandex can also be filtered, replacing non-independent wikis with text inviting you to visit the independent counterpart.

Indie Wiki Buddy also supports BreezeWiki, a service that renders Fandom wikis without ads or bloat. This helps give you a more enjoyable reading experience on Fandom when an independent wiki isn't available.

Adding wikis

We're always expanding with new wiki redirects! Please review the criteria for inclusion below.

Our wiki redirect data is maintained in the separate indie-wiki-buddy-data repository.

Suggestions can be made via our Google Form. However, GitHub contributors are encouraged to directly open an issue or open a pull request.

Criteria for inclusion

The wiki should be editable by the public (that's what makes a wiki a wiki!)
The destination wiki should be independent, meaning that decision-making and control of the wiki largely rests with the wiki's staff and volunteer editing community.
- Factors include editorial independence, the editorbase's ability to request changes from their host, and any history of the host exerting decisions contrary to a wiki community's wishes.
- Large hosts such as Miraheze and Wiki.gg may be considered less independent, but are included as they are community-friendly hosts, provide decent levels of control, and are popular destinations for forking wikis.
The destination wiki should be of decent quality, ideally matching (or exceeding) the quality and size of the origin wiki. While we want to support all independent wikis, we also want extension users to be directed to wikis where they can find what they are looking for.
When there are multiple independent wikis on the same subject, we will usually point to the wiki that is most complete and prominent in the community.

Translations

This extension can be translated on Hosted Weblate (link to the translation project). If you're interested in helping translate, please register for an account at hosted.weblate.org, and you should be able to dive right in and start translating!

Frequently asked questions

Is indie-wiki-buddy free to use?

indie-wiki-buddy is open source under the MIT licence. There is no licence fee and no seat count — you can self-host it or, where the project offers one, pay a vendor for a managed version instead.

What does indie-wiki-buddy do?

Browser extension that automatically notifies and redirects you to independent wikis.

What is indie-wiki-buddy written in?

indie-wiki-buddy is primarily written in JavaScript. Its source is publicly available at https://github.com/IndieWikiBuddy/indie-wiki-buddy, and it has 546 GitHub stars.