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 READMEs.
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.
If you create a wiki in a public repository, the wiki is available to the public. If you create a wiki in a private repository, only people with access to the repository can access the wiki. For more information, see Setting repository visibility.
You can edit wikis directly on GitHub, or you can edit wiki files locally. By default, only people with write access to your repository can make changes to wikis, although you can allow everyone on GitHub.com to contribute to a wiki in a public repository. For more information, see Changing access permissions for wikis.
Note
Search engines will only index wikis with 500 or more stars that you configure to prevent public editing. For more information, see Changing access permissions for wikis.
If you need search engines to index your content, you can use GitHub Pages in a public repository. For more information, see GitHub Pages.
Note
For performance reasons, wikis have a soft limit of 5,000 total files, regardless of file type. If you exceed this limit, some pages may be inaccessible to users. If you need a larger wiki, we recommend using GitHub Pages. For more information, see GitHub Pages.