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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 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 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 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 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 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.
- PhpWiki
- TiwiKiwi
- DekiWiki
- Xwiki
- FlexWiki
- OpenWiki
- Kwiki
- Very Quick Wiki
- TiddlyWiki (Thanks to Binny)
Do you see another use of Wiki? Have you used any of the mentioned Wiki engines? Share your experience.
Popularity: 19% [?]
| Print article | This entry was posted by Benedict Herold on August 15, 2007 at 11:13 pm, and is filed under open source. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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about 3 years ago
You left out my personal favorite – TiddlyWiki(www.tiddlywiki.com)
about 3 years ago
Binny V A – My bad, I have added it to ‘to-try’ list. TiddlyWiki sounds interesting.! Thanks for sharing!
about 3 years ago
A very interesting post there. And yeah, like Binny said, TiddlyWiki is an awesome tool. Will try the others you mentioned here.
about 3 years ago
Nice post Ben . I havent tried anyone till now but will sure give them a try now .
about 3 years ago
I have mainly used Media Wiki, will try out the others mentioned.
about 3 years ago
Nice post buddy, i tried mediawiki so far, i haven’t tried others.
about 3 years ago
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)
about 3 years ago
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!
about 3 years ago
My brother was just asking me about other wikis. Now I can just point him to this post. Thanks buddy!
about 3 years ago
Brown Baron – I’m glad to find myself being helpful for you! I’m honored now!
about 3 years ago
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
about 3 years ago
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.
about 3 years ago
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
about 3 years ago
Btw…off topic, but about you: Friday Night’s Alright For Link Love! – Batch 2
Shine on,
Aaron
about 3 years ago
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
about 3 years ago
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.
about 3 years ago
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.
about 3 years ago
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!
about 2 years ago
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.)
about 2 years ago
Since TiddlyWiki was mentioned, you might also want to add Luminotes to the list (http://luminotes.com/). It’s another great personal wiki, with a big emphasis on WYSIWYG visual editing and ease of use.
about 2 years ago
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.
about 1 year ago
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.
about 1 year ago
I am also looking for good Wiki server to host Knowledge base internally. Please suggest.
about 1 year ago
Take a look at MindTouch Deki. http://mindtouch.com/Technology (for technical persons) or just download and check it out. There is an open source and commercial version.
about 11 months ago
I am giving mediawiki a try, but I am not sure it is very seo friendly! Not as good as wordpress in the search, I use both.
about 11 months ago
I am trying to get another install done, I have adjusted some of the pages, just wonder if it will make any change.
about 10 months ago
For all the minimalists out there, try LionWiki – http://lionwiki.0o.cz
It’s very small, very easy to install but is sufficient for most tasks (and has some useful plugins).
about 9 months ago
the one i use =) http://www.freebase.com/