Choosing the Best Wiki for You

The wiki engine is among those impressive technologies developed and improved in the last 10 years. Here, users can make an interactive website or a comprehensive knowledge base on any corporate, social, political, or topic, and share it with other users in the online community. You can download wiki software as a ready-made tool, which in most cases you can use for free. So how do you choose the best wiki? This article enumerates the factors to be considered in evaluating wiki and describes the features of three top wiki engines: TikiWiki, DokuWiki, and MediaWiki.

Evaluating wiki

One of the major factors that you should take into consideration when evaluating which wiki is best for you is the ease of installation. Another criterion is user accounts, so that your name is attached automatically to all revisions you make. You also need to consider page change subscription by RSS and email, stored revisions and page history (it can be a very important feature, only some wikis have this), a syntax that is easy to remember and document attachments.

In addition, check for page edit locking. Of course, you do not want three or four people editing a page simultaneously, as one person will lose the changes. A wiki engine that looks great is something that you do not necessarily need. You have to bear in mind that this is all about organizing projects, and not making pages that are good enough to print. Do not bother with wiki engines that have great total layout control at the expense of simple syntax.

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is a standards-compliant, easy-to-use wiki system, primarily designed to create documentation of any kind. It is the best wiki for you if you are writing documentation for a small- and medium-sized company. DokuWiki also targets developer teams and work groups. It enables you to easily create structured content. DokuWiki has a simple yet powerful syntax, allowing you to read data files outside the wiki. In addition, it also helps work groups and teams interact with much ease while working on certain project. All data is archived in plain text files. No database is needed. DokuWiki (and also TikiWiki and MediaWiki) is written in PHP.

TikiWiki

Written in PHP. TikiWiki is an important open-source Groupware and Content Management System that can be used to make intranets and websites. It can give you great resources when you use this engine for a collaboration tool. TikiWiki can be used for forums (like phpBB), chat rooms, articles (like Digg), poll taking, blog (like WordPress), map Server (like Google Maps), file and image gallery (like Flickr), link Ddrectory (like DMOZ), FAQ, multilingual (like Babel Fish), bug tracker (like Bugzilla), calendar, and many more!

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a very popular wiki engine on the Internet. It runs Wikipedia (currently the largest online encyclopedia) and some projects of WikiMedia Foundation, and many other wikis. This wiki software supports a number of languages, multimedia and extension features, website user styles, edit tracking, content items index, talk pages, and many more. MediaWiki is best for educational and personal use.