Love it or hate it, think it’s an ego-stroker for pop-culture geeks or the most democratic application of human knowledge, or something in between, there is no denying the success of Wikipedia. While the problems you would expect from a site that anyone can edit, like vandalism, slander, and complete misinformation are rampant and continually thwarted, it still contains an unbelievable amount of information that is accurate and useful. Between Wikipedia and Google, I feel like there’s nothing that I can’t find the answer to.

Even the reason for this little blog, beer, is well-represented on Wikipedia. Check out the Wikipedia Portal: Beer.

But, as you know, no general knowledge resource can reach the depth of information for a topic as well as a resource focused on just that topic. So, I decided to look around to see if there was a “Wikipedia for Beer”. A “Beer-o-pedia” if you will.

Indeed, there are a number of community-driven open content Wikipedia-like projects out there on the world wide web. In fact, all of the ones I found in a brief search are using the same software as Wikipedia. Unfortunately, for the most part, they are not very well developed, and in at least one case seems to be fairly well abandoned.

Brewerpedia
This was only launched recently, and it shows. They appear to be looking to cover beer, wine, mead, spirits, and soda. Only there are only a handful of pages, and none of them very well developed. Only five registered developers. Unless they start adding content there’s nothing worthwhile.

Beer Wiki at Wikia
Wikia is a commercial concern from Jimbo Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia. The idea is that they offer the Wikipedia software and hosting, limit repeat topics, and make money with ad revenue. Its relationship to Wikimedia should give it a leg up, but it really doesn’t and it shows. The focus is purely beer, but there still aren’t that many pages, but what is a little more developed. There is still less than a dozen registered users.

Beeropedia
Now this is more like it. Lots of articles are still “stubs”, but there are many that are fairly well fleshed out. Some of the information offered for individual beers includes alcohol content, containers, and links to commercials. Still, there’s still not as much information as can be found at Wikipedia. And, again, fewer than a dozen registered users. (Not that this is a real measure of its quality, but a site like this needs to be popular in order to get people to add content, and a popular site should have a lot of registered users.)

Beeripedia - The Beer Wiki
Like Wikia, this resource is ad supported, although apparently not a pet project of a multi-millionaire. More pages are available, although many are still just “stubs”. There are over a hundred registered users, however. Judging by the logs, it is also the most active of all of these. If I were to sign on to help out at any of these, this would be the one.

Still, none of these can match the amount of pure beer information available at Wikipedia. There are certainly a few reasons for this: Wikipedia has been around for several years and has thousands of editors. The style guidelines are well-established, and prolific editors contribute across multiple topics. And, of course, there some very large non-wiki beer community sites with a wealth of information, such as BeerAdvocate.

What’s your favorite beer-focused community site/wiki?

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