What is Wikifonia?

Wikifonia is the place for musicians to publish and collaborate on lead sheets.

  • Publish your lead sheet in one step.
  • Select a license such as Creative Commons.
  • Find other music writers to collaborate with.
  • Browse and download high quality lead sheets for free.
  • No subscription fee, registering goes real quick.
  • Author rights of copyrighted music are compensated.

  • The name

    The name Wikifonia™ derives from the words wiki and symphonia and is inspired by the name Wikipedia which stands for wiki-encyclopedia. A Wiki is a type of website that allows users to easily add and edit content and is especially suited for collaborative writing. Symphonia is Greek for 'concordant in sound'. The two words together are indicating the creation of music via the internet. Using the reputation of Wikipedia, the goal of Wikifonia should make itself clear: building an online encyclopedia of music by wiki collaboration.

  • A legal framework

    By cooperation with a music copyright association Musicopy, Wikifonia is a legal framework where also copyrighted music can be published. Still, if any right holder does not wish to find their music notation on Wikifonia, Wikifonia can easily be contacted and notified to remove infringing music titles.

  • The history

    Wikifonia launched on the 6th of November 2006 as a publishing website for lead sheets. On a lead sheet, you typical find chords, a melody line and lyrics. Soon after that, collaboration features were added such as versioning control to make is easier for the community to collaborate on the sheets.

  • The team

    The team behind Wikifonia is centralized in Ghent (Belgium). But as we are children of the internet age, we feel more like citizens of the world. In a very early stage, we got direct help from a French Connection. Indirectly, we are non-stop supported by open source communities such as Drupal and Lilypond.