Top 5 open source Wiki engines

A Wiki is a website which visitors can modify. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration

Why Wiki?

This is very commonly asked and answered question. But here is the few uses which I feel about a Wiki.

Educational: It can be used as instrumental tool for building knowledge management system. Wiki is also been used as Text books in few educational institutions.

Collaboration: It allows the project team to collaborate on any specific task / idea.

Documentation: It can be used for the documentation purpose of any project. Draft version of document can be developed greatly using Wiki features.

Personal: It can be used for personal note taking purpose and book marking.

Top 5 –

Here is the list of popular open source Wiki engines. This list is not complied in chronological order according to their popularity.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is most popular and holds the crown amongst the list. MediaWiki free web based software Wiki engine that was originally written for Wikipedia. MediaWiki is been adopted by several corporate and institutions as their internal knowledge management system. MediaWiki is written in PHP language and supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL RDBMS.

TWiki

TWiki

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, secure, yet simple web-based collaboration platform. TWiki can be used to run a project development space, a document management system, a knowledge base or any other groupware tool on either an intranet or on the Internet. This Wiki is been mostly used by lot of enterprise including Yahoo and others. TWiki is written in PERL.

PmWiki

PmWikiPmWiki is a free wiki-based system for collaborative creation and maintenance of websites. PmWiki pages look and act like normal web pages, except they can be edited or new pages can be added. Page editing can be left open to the public or restricted to small groups of authors. PmWiki works over text file and is written in PHP.

DokuWiki

DokuWikiDokuWiki is simple and lightweight Wiki engine. The administration option is very simple and comes with one click installation. DokuWiki is highly customizable with your current website theme. DokuWiki is written in PHP and works on small text file. DokuWiki is my personal favorite since it keeps everything simple!

MoinMoinWiki

MoinMoinWikiMoinMoinWiki is a web application for making large database of knowledge basing. It produces nice structured information with feature of expansion information in cooperation manner with appropriate use it is power full content database. Alternatively, desktop edition of the Wiki is also available. It uses flat file for storing the information.

Here is the list of few other open source Wiki engines which is worth giving a try.

Do you see another use of Wiki? Have you used any of the mentioned Wiki engines? Share your experience.

38 thoughts on “Top 5 open source Wiki engines”

  1. Pingback: University Update - Open Source - Top 5 open source Wiki engines

  2. Seriously, wikipedia annoys me. I tried to add some very important and pertinent info (to a great site) and it was taken down because the site had ads. Give me a break. (Sorry, had to vent)

  3. Shankar Ganesh – Thank you! I’m thinking how dumb I’m to miss out favorite Wiki of couple of people out there 🙁

    Madhur Kapoor – It is the right time to give a try may be you will find it usefull yourself.!

    Nirmal – Cool, you can try out TWiki; if you’re trying to setup in enterprise.

    Ram – Salute! Other Wikis are cool too.. give a try!

    Bush Mackel – I’m surprised to see your reaction. I didn’t know Wikipedia would bring down the content for having ads. Anyway you can try out Wikis mentioned here in your site with ease!

  4. This is a great post Benedict. I've been researching Wikis lately, as I plan to set up a few of my own. This post was a nice reminder for me to get my butt in gear! 🙂

    And Bush is right. Wikipedia does at times kick out valuable information/content due to ads and such (or for whatever reason they want to). Basically, it depends on who is overseeing the edits and in what subject the edits/additions appear. Some subjects are watched lightly, whereas others are watched with a vengeance.

    Many times it's hit-or-miss. Your best bet is to sigh up for an actual account and wait a bit before editing/adding. Once you have an "established" account you have a much better chance of your edits/additions being accepted than if you're a regular user. Trust me, I know. I had to find the loopholes myself.

    The trick is to appear as a seasoned Wikipedia member who only adds stuff that is valuable to the entire community, as opposed to someone just trying to add links and content to benefit themselves. Like many things, it's a delicate balancing act.

    Shine on,
    Aaron

  5. Aaron Cook – Its been great to see its been help for you guys! So on what purpose are you setting up the Wiki?

    Hmm… You're correct about it. It all depends on person who is overseeing the edits. Long time back I managed to add my links to certain topics! But those were not hot topics and I guess they won't be watched a lot at all.!

    You're suggestion would work out to get into Wikipedia. I have been hearing Wikipedia can bring in good steady traffic too! Who will not love to have it 🙂

    But we should be cautious in doing that and should not encourage people adding links which are not related to the topic just for traffic.

  6. Hi Benedict,

    I want to set up some wikis on my own for traffic purposes.

    And yes, Wikipedia can and does bring in steady traffic. Like I said, you just have to be careful how you go about it and where you put your edits/additions.

    The External links section is obviously the best/only choice. But, one must be sure that what he/she ads has a lot value, otherwise it'll be deleted within minutes.

    The trick is to find topics that are not highly watched or highly trafficked. Edits on the high traffic pages generally only last a few minutes before being deleted.

    So find topics that are either in the middle or low end trafficwise. And remember, valuable info./content is the key. Take your time with it. In the end it's worth it, as you can be featured on sites like Answers.com, etc. Like I've been.

    For example, just take a look here: http://www.answers.com/topic/web-widget

    Look under the "Reviews" section. That Widgetbox review is mine and leads right to my blog! Things like that bring in a steady flow of new visitors. The trick is finding the loophole. So if anyone wants to know, feel free to email me.

    Shine on,
    Aaron

  7. A fine list indeed. I do find that TWiki is pretty good for light wiki usage and I would prefer it over MediaWiki for smaller wikis

  8. Aaron Cook – That is good explaination Aaron. Hopefully, Bush would be able to get success with Wikipedia 😉

    BTW, Thank you for featuring me there!

    I got to tell you this, you're comments are getting filtered as SPAM. May be you want to write to Akismet about it.

    Vijay – Thank you gentleman! DokuWiki is another good alternative for light weight version.

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  13. Wow! didn't know that there were so many open source scripts for wiki's. But, I'm sure that MediaWiki will be the best of the lot. It's powering wikipedia, so it will have to be the best.

  14. Mayank – Actually, there are bunch of other Wiki scripts out there which didn't make in to this list either they were not good or i didn't know about it! Yes, MediaWiki is the best but the same to resource hungry too! So not good for personal wiki perspective!

  15. Benedict, Vijay: Although TWiki is also used in smaller teams, its real strength are the enterprise feature. TWiki is an enterprise wiki with more than two million users and 60,000 installations worldwide. There are large deployments at Cisco Systems, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, Nokia, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems, Wind River, Yahoo and others, some with over 100K pages and tens of thousands of users.

    People are using the platform to create wiki applications, such as contact lists, inventory systems, status report roll-ups, blog apps, discussion forums, sales opportunity trackers and other custom applications. Those apps are done on the wiki markup level. You can find out more on that at twiki.org (open source site) and twiki.net (commercial entity.)

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  17. Thanks for your post. There are some useful wikis at OpenSourceCMS, but I think your post is good, too.

    I tried some wikis, and I found that some good wikis (like MediaWiki and Wikka) is too big. I like pmwiki by its good design and small size.

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  19. Very informative indeed. Thank you. On a similar subject… Knowledgebase software is very closely related with Wikis. However, I prefer KBs to be in a Q&A format… somewhat like a FAQ but more advanced probably. So can you recommend a few open source KB applications that work well and are not a pain to get up and running?

    Cheers.
    Ani.

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  21. Hi,

    I am new to this stuff, can anyone suggest if a wiki is useful in establishing a collaboration among a distributed team of people. The basic requirement in my mind is to setup something to put my files (word, excel, project) and two of my team members can review and make comments on the contents of the file. When I upload a new version of the file, they should be able to see what has happened in past.

    Regards.

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