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.
