i have a small group of programmers and we want to start using a WIKI. we want it wysiwyg because we have our analysts and users adding and editing pages as well.
we are looking for free and we want to host it ourselves on windows preferrably and simple to use as possible.
any recommendations that fits these requirements
Okay, do you mean you want a wiki that you can host on Windows, or do you mean you're looking for a free wiki that you can use?
For a free wiki that's usable, I have been pretty happy with PBWiki.
For a wiki you can host, most of them can be easily hosted on windows. If you have a PHP stack, Mediawiki is good.
The c2 wiki keeps a good list of implementations.
Trac supports wysiwyg with a plugin. Most of of the cool Trac functionality is being done by plugins and there are tons of them on the net. You can even write Your own plugins.
The advantage of this solution is that it also has a ticket system and with this plugin, Your coders can use the wiki syntax and Your non-technical people can use WYSIWYG - everyone is happy.
Trying to make a coder use wysiwyg can be as hard as trying to make a buissness guy to write wiki syntax.
If hosting on Windows Server 2003 is an option, consider Windows SharePoint Services. The end-user experience will be quite good, though it may be more headache to standup and maintain than you like.
From the Wikipedia article:
WSS is provided as a free download from Microsoft for Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or later... WSS 3 is an object model for creating web pages and... is only provided for Microsoft servers and cannot be deployed on any other OS.
The WSS 3.0 wiki..., when viewed in Internet Explorer, provides a WYSIWYG editor. As with MediaWiki, it produces hyperlinks with a double square bracket but unlike MediaWiki it uses HTML for markup. An enhanced wiki is available for SharePoint on Codeplex and is free to download and install.
I think your best choice would be mindtouch deki wiki http://www.mindtouch.com/
foswiki ( http://foswiki.org ) is nice too, but for your use case (windows) will be harder to set up.
Also mediawiki (the engine behind wikipedia) maybe a a good option. It is very poor feature-wise and has no wysiwyg, but the wikipedia reputation (and its simplicity) may make it a much less intimidating option than better engines for the non-techies. If your non-tech population view the arrival of a wiki as a burden ("what are these geeks going to force us to use now?") this could be a good option, as however good the wysiwyg-in-a-browser solutions are they aren't near the power and comfort of word.
Based on what you're asking, I strongly suggest Mindtouch Deki.
I tried a few wiki platforms before deciding on Deki and it seemed to me like the nicest one out there to install and configure. Also, it is easy to get users on board because pages contain HTML edited with FCKeditor, no wiki syntax involved -- especially valuable if you're dealing with programmers who can handle writing some HTML by hand.
On a separate note, I would stay away from MediaWiki if I were you, it proved to be unnecessarily arcane for a workgroup wiki.