What Is IFWiki and What Can You Find on It?

Updated

IFWiki (ifwiki.org) is a community-maintained, wiki-style encyclopedia of interactive fiction. It covers IF history, theory, craft, tools, and people, and it works both as a historical record of community knowledge and as a practical guide to resources for playing and creating interactive fiction. It is most useful if you want a single reference point for games, authoring tools, interpreters, events, and the people behind them — rather than reviews or downloads of individual titles.

What IFWiki covers

The site organizes its content into a few main areas, each with its own browse and add pages:

Area What you'll find
Games Searchable and browsable game entries, plus a cover art gallery
Events Competitions, jams, conferences, meetings, and other events, with a calendar
Software Interpreters, authoring systems, utilities, and libraries
Architecture Entries on IF architecture
Other categories Accessibility, basics, glossary, and people

The "people" section is worth noting: IFWiki documents authors, tool makers, and organizers, which is part of its role as a community historical record. The glossary and basics pages are useful entry points if you're new to IF terminology.

How the site is structured

IFWiki uses standard wiki conventions. Each page has tabs for reading, viewing source, and viewing history, so you can see how an entry has changed over time. A navigation menu links to the main sections, recent changes, and a random page. There is also a dark mode option.

Because it's a wiki, content is added and edited by the community. The site provides "Add game," "Add event," and "Add software" pages, and editing projects are announced on the main page — for example, a 2026 project to add source code URLs to game pages, and a request to populate new "War" and "Wordplay" literary genre categories on existing game pages.

What's on the main page

The front page functions as a dashboard of current activity:

  • Calendar — a full-page calendar of events, with an option to add one.
  • Event news — competition and jam results and deadlines. As of the page's date (October 13, 2026), this includes InkJam 2026 and IntroComp 2026 results, IFComp 2026 voting ending October 19, ECTOCOMP 2026 and Bare-Bones Jam 2026 submissions due October 31, and the Interactive Fiction Showcase 2026 due December 31.
  • Meetings and conferences — recurring gatherings such as ClubFloyd (weekly), Neo-Interactives jams (monthly), and monthly meetings of the People's Republic of Interactive Fiction, the Seattle IF Group, and the SF Bay Area Interactive Fiction Group.
  • Announcements — site news and editing projects.
  • Feature of the day — a rotating highlighted entry.

A security notice you should know about

The main page states that the wiki server was recently hacked. The site believes password hashes were not compromised, but it requires users to reset their password at Special:PasswordReset before logging in. Further details are linked in "IFWiki:September 2026 security incident." If you have an existing account, reset your password before attempting to log in; if you're only reading, no account is needed.

When IFWiki is the right resource

Use IFWiki when you want to:

  • Look up a specific game, author, tool, or interpreter in an encyclopedic format.
  • Track IF competitions, jams, and recurring community meetings.
  • Find authoring systems and interpreters to start creating or playing IF.
  • Understand IF terminology and history.

It is less suited to reading reviews or downloading games directly — those live elsewhere in the community. For current deadlines, check the calendar and event news, since dates on the main page reflect the moment it was last updated.