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A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone (excluding blocked or banned users) who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. Wikis are used in business to provide intranets and Knowledge Management systems.

Wiki software is a type of collaborative software that runs a wiki system. This typically allows web pages to be created and edited using a common web browser. It is usually implemented as an application server that runs on one or more web servers. The content is stored in a file system, and changes to the content are stored in a relational database management system.

Wikis is very interesting software when you want your users to interact and participate in the development of the content. The most famous wiki is probably Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia which is built up by users adding content.

Some wikis can be extended with plugins and can also be integrated in your web site and/or CMS. There is also a variety of skins/themes to change the look and feel as well as a rich language support.

MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation and many other wikis, including some of the largest and most popular ones. Originally developed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopaedia, today it has also been deployed by companies for internal knowledge management, and as a content management system. Notably, Novell uses it to operate several of its high traffic websites.

MediaWiki is designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is extremely powerful, scaleable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.

Pages use MediaWiki's wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.

When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

Development Status: Production/Stable.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL).
Operating System: Cross Platform.
Available Languages: English.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

DokuWiki

DokuWiki is a standard compliant, simple to use Wiki, mainly aimed at creating documentation of any kind. It is targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies. It has a simple but powerful syntax which makes sure the data files remain readable outside the Wiki and eases the creation of structured texts. All data is stored in plain text files – no database is required. Its syntax is similar to the one used by MediaWiki and makes sure the data files remain readable outside the wiki.

Development Status: Production/Stable.
License: GNU General Public License (GPL).
Operating System: Cross Platform.
Available Languages: English.
http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

The base of this text is researched from different sources. The facts that are presented are checked and double-checked to be as correct and accurate as possible. However, Success Webmasters makes no representations or warranties as to the completeness or accuracy of the information.