I had planned to write a blog post about the differences between the wiki library and the enterprise wiki site template. It turns out that Bernado Nguyen-Hoan over at Bernado Nguyen-Hoan’s Blog – Coding Stories from an IT Mercenary has beaten me to it!
Differences between Enterprise Wiki and Wiki Page Library in SharePoint 2013
Here’s a quick summary:
| Wiki Library | Enterprise Wiki | |
| Description | A library created under a site, next to the existing Pages or SitePages library | A site collection template with a Pages library |
| Content type | Locked | Available |
| Page type | Text layout | Page layouts |
| Metadata | While you can manually add metadata to Wiki Page Library, you can’t add the fields to the text layouts. This means users would have to edit the content of the page, then separately edit the properties of the page to enter metadata, which is not good for encouraging metadata entry. You can enable rating for the Wiki Page Library, but again, the only way for users to rate a page is to go to the View All Pages view of the library. | With Enterprise Wiki you get Categories and Rating OOTB. These are placed on the OOTB page layouts, |
| Misc | Shows “updated pages” on left navigation | Reusable content, add a page from site actions menu |
Both types of wikis are useful – it’s just a question of deciding which one to use in which situation.
Hannah's SharePoint 
Is there a way to add/edit links in the left navigation of an Enterprise Wiki?
You should be able to do this via the Navigation setting in site settings.
Thanks! What’s throwing me off is the inconsistency of when the “Edit Links” option is available on a team site and when it’s not. Does not appear to be permission related. Appears to be template related :)
What’s the best way to convert an existing OOTB wiki pages to custom Enterprise Wiki page layout that has some custom code in it (print button added to page layout)?
Out of the box wiki pages (sitepages) and enterprise wikis are different content types, so there is no easy way from the front end to convert. Without using some sort of Powershell solution, I would suggest that copy/paste might be the fastest way.
If I was to create a wiki page layout from the olso template, with several wiki pages that use text layouts, is it possible to add a global region either above or below the wiki text layout that can be displayed on every page (without re-creating the content over and over again?) I am ussing the answer is to put that code in the master template, but I was curious if there was something OOTB that allows for global HTML regions.
thanks!
Hi Kensley – in this case, you would want to be updating the page layouts/master page. There is no global HTML region in SharePoint.
You could build a webpart zone into desired area of the custom page layout and use a content webpart to display your reusable content.
But you would have to add that CEWP to every page. Much better if the master page was modified.
Agreed, assuming the masterpage isn’t ALSO being used for pages the shouldn’t be showing the reusable content.
I suppose a custom layout could be created for those pages with the reusable content hard-coded into it.
It seems to me that wiki libraries have been left in to allow organisations that lack the budget or skillbase to develop custom page layouts to add wikis to their deployments.
The Enterprise Wiki seems in every way superior as long as you have the knowledge and skills to create a few page layouts in SharePoint Designer to mimic the text layouts available elsewhere.
what about the mobile view capabilities for both solutions. as inside the Wiki library if you enable the “Mobile view” site feature, then wiki pages are going to be displayed in a mobile friendly layout which is great, while if i enable the “mobile view” site features inside an enterprise wiki site collection, then the wiki page body will get rendered as blank white page. not sure what cause this to happen ??
I’m really not sure – this would need to be tested well.
i tested this even on a new enterprise wiki site collection , where i did not do any type of customization. but when i enable the “mobile browser view” site feature inside the enterprise wiki site collection, and i access the wiki site collection from my mobile phone i can see the site navigation and wiki page title rendered inside a mobile view, but the wiki page body will always be rendered as an empty white page. to test this you can just enable the “mobile browser view” inside your site collection, then type the following “?mobile=1” at the end of the url so it will rendered a mobile view even if you are using your desktop browser … can you adivce ?
Sorry – I don’t know without digging deep into this. Good luck!