I spent a few weeks in December 2005 investigating the universe of wiki software, and confirmed what I already suspected: It’s a very big universe with many wikis! It would be impossible to explore them all, so I first tried to come up with a short list of wiki engines to focus on. Fortunately, there are a number of excellent sites that attempt to provide matrices of wiki software functions and abilities. Here are a few I used and recommend:

• Good reviews of wiki software at onLamp.com, a site devoted to open-source LAMP products.
• This is a very thorough “choice tree” for wikis.
• Splitbrain, which makes Dokuwiki, has a good comparison page on wikis.
• Best of all, don’t miss the new Wiki Matrix website, which evolved from a static HTML table matrix last fall.

After studying these various resources, I was able to narrow the list of wikis down to the following:

• MediaWiki (my default choice)
• PMWiki
• UseModWiki
• phpWiki
• Dokuwiki
• TikiWiki.

MediaWiki was the default choice, since I assumed it was probably the best of the lot, given its starring role in powering Wikipedia and just about every other high-profile wiki you encounter on the web. After a painless default installation of MediaWiki, I had the usual MediaWiki shell and did a few quick walk-throughs of the structure just to make sure all the plumbing was in place. It seemed to be, so I proceeded to install a few of the others from my short list.

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