What is the best wiki for a small project or a home site?

Question

There are lots of different wiki implementations. For a lightweight site you might not want a heavyweight implementation (e.g. like Tiki). What are good wiki implementations and why? By lightweight site I mean small number of users and relatively low bandwidth.

Don't just list links, give reasons why they are good, e.g. easy install, markup, maintenance, support, implementation language, requirements etc.

EDIT (in response to comments): I'm not asking for a vote/poll on different wikis. I'm asking why you think a given implementation is good. I'm discouraging polling i.e. "I like X". It's a waste of time people just stating which wiki they like without an explanation and they should be voted down (even if you like that wiki).

The post that should win this question is the best explanation of why you chose your wiki. Some of this is subjective, but I've said I want a lightweight, low administration, low bandwidth implementation.

Answer 1

ScrewTurn Wiki

Nice, complete package, open source and free. And Jeff Atwood seems to endorse it as well: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000893.html

Answer 2

I like MoinMoin.

Answer 3

I would suggest Trac. It's open source, easily extended, has Subversion integration and bug tracking abilities. It's also easy to set up.

Answer 4

I like MediaWiki a lot. It's fairly simple to install and get going with. And you can make it as complex as you want, or keep it as simple as you like.

Its also not too heavy over the Internet.

Answer 5

Another vote for ScrewTurn.

Answer 6

The definition of lightweight is kind of subjective, but it looks like you just want something that you won't have to worry about dying under the strain of many users.

I use XAMPP on a thumb drive to run a MediaWiki instance. Since MediaWiki is what runs Wikipedia, I'm certain it could handle a few users. You'd probably not want to install it on a flash drive for multiple people though; it's noticeably slow when I use it.

Before I used this, I had a local instance of ScrewTurn running. It was nice, and the only reason I changed was I like the default formatting and markup language of MediaWiki a little better; I didn't feel like mucking about with CSS to make it look like I wanted.

Before that, I used Tiddlywiki, which is probably not lightweight by your definition. It's just an HTML file with a lot of JavaScript that does the wiki magic. This means each user has to download the file to work with it, so bandwidth might be a problem. Supposedly a few sites use it for multiple-user editing, but I'm not very knowledgeable about that.

Personally I'd recommend MediaWiki or ScrewTurn with no real reason for preferring MediaWiki. Both were a no-brainer to set up, both have easy-to-use markup. If you're better with .NET than PHP, you'll have an easier time extending ScrewTurn if you need to. Personally I just liked the MediaWiki formatting a little better.

Answer 7

37signals' Backpack! Simple, and does what you want. Free. No install.

Answer 8

In my experience PmWiki (http://pmwiki.org) is the easiest to setup & manage. Not requiring a database is a big plus in this regard.

The markup is fairly easy to understand and there is a relatively large developer community for extra features not included in the base install.

The notion of 'Groups' also helps when setting up a wiki for use on multiple projects (or subsystems of a larger project).

Answer 9

I like ikiwiki. I was wondering why most wiki engines reinvent a poorly specified, noninteroperable, nondistributed, fragile RCS without tagging, branching, merging, etc. So I looked around and ikiwiki seemed to be the most mature and most active and well-supported wiki project that used a proper RCS backend.

I've set up ikiwiki to use a git backend which works brilliantly. I've also written a blog post about my experiences with ikiwiki. Here are the highlights:

• The wiki pages and history are stored in a proper revision control system (I'm using Git, but ikiwiki supports Subversion and some others too). This is better than the wiki author reinventing a poorly specified, noninteroperable, nondistributed, fragile RCS without tagging, branching, merging, etc.
• As a consequence of the above, I can edit my wiki text in a proper text editor without having to use the anemic <textarea> editor box in my browser. I just edit the files using vim in a git clone, committing as I go, and then push the changes up to the master repository. Of course, ikiwiki still supports the traditional <textarea> browser box if you want.
• As a further consequence of the above, I can edit my wiki without having to have a live connection to the net. I just make changes offline and push them back up when I've got a connection. No more inconvenient page locking or edit collisions caused by a substandard revision control system. I have a simple non-RCS-backed install of ikiwiki on my laptop to preview changes.
• ikiwiki does not need to implement its own page history browsing. It just links to your RCS web interface (gitweb, in my case).
• ikiwiki compiles all your normal wiki pages to static HTML files. There's no extra load on your web server when people are just browsing pages. Only when somebody edits a page does it kick off a server script to handle the edit. (Changes made elsewhere and pushed up to the repository are handled by a post-commit hook that regenerates modified pages.)
• As a consequence of the above, it is trivial to take a snapshot of an entire wiki - just copy the HTML files. Other wiki engines need some kind of "export" function, which they might not even have (I'm looking at you, DokuWiki).
• ikiwiki uses the Markdown markup language, which is more flexible and more readable (as source) than most wiki markup languages. It's flexible because you can embed any HTML whenever you like, if you need to do something not otherwise supported by Markdown.
• ikiwiki has a plugin architecture, and many of the standard features (such as the use of Markdown, or the username/password authentication) are in fact plugins to the base engine.
• ikiwiki is a cool name, and it even contains a "kiwi"!

Answer 10

it depends a little on whether or not you care to host it yourself or not. If not, PBWiki works pretty well, essentially 0 set-up time and fairly standard wiki-syntax. But it's on someone else's server.

PMWiki is also good; light-weight, again fairly standard syntax and fairly easy-to-use editing tools. It has the advantage of not requiring a databases - it's all flat-file driven.

If you're going to host it yourself, though, and you have access to a database, the MediaWiki installation is pretty straight-forward, and it's (IMHO) the gold standard for wikis, so why not use the best?

If you're on Windows, the only one I've seen worth the time is Deki Wiki, but Telligent is releasing a wiki within Community Server today which might be worth a look.

Answer 11

One that is hosted and maintained by someone other than yourself. Unless you are a budding sysadmin, chances are that you are more interested in what is going into the wiki then the creation, management, patching, updating, backing up and securing it.

There are a number of different providers out there, which google will gladly tell you about. (IMO they are all pretty much the same)

Answer 12

I've used Instiki. It's great because the setup is truly trivial (basically install ruby and run. It provides its own web service so no messing with IIS or Apache)

Answer 13

tiddlywiki may be what you're looking for. it's a serverless, stand-alone wiki that is entirely self-contained. it has a several server adaptations, if you prefer that. unfortunately it relies heavily on javascript.

Answer 14

I like DokuWiki. It's simple and complete and doesn't need a database. I use it for FAQ Wikis. I set it up in a couple of minutes (even seconds!) and forget it until the next version.

Answer 15

CVSTrac has both a bug tracking and wiki a portion to it. It is written in C by D. Richard Hipp, the main force behind SQLite. It can run on old machines etc. It doesn't even require much to run.

Answer 16

If you don't mind having your wiki hosted on a third-party site, I can recommend PBWiki, which is reasonably straightforward and scalable. Their free package will cover the needs of most small/home projects.

Answer 17

I 2nd PBWiki

Answer 18

I heartily endorse Redmine for issue tracking - in which case you get an integrated Wiki as well.

Answer 19

Twiki

Runs on Linux, Apache, and Perl. Fairly simple setup and administration. Has a decent feature set and supports plug-ins.

Answer 20

• TiddlyWiki (JavaScript) is simple to set up and use for a single user on a single machine (of course, you can synchronise)
• MoinMoin (Python) is a server-based wiki that I use, mainly because it's blazingly fast (especially with Apache/mod_python)
• MediaWiki (PHP) is relatively easy to set up, but I thought it a bit sluggish (even with mod_php)

Answer 21

+1 for DokuWiki. Really easy. Lots of plugins. Runs on any vanilla php installation. Needs no database.

Answer 22

One that I've been impressed with so far is WikkaWiki. It has an installer which makes it a doddle to configure. Nice syntax. You can also embed Mindmaps in it (e.g. Freemind). It's not bloated with features and is easy to manage. It's PHP with MySQL backend.

I'm also very partial to MoinMoin since it requires no database backend, only Python, is very scalable and nicely designed. It would be really nice if it had an installer, like more PHP apps are getting these days.

DokuWiki looks quite nice, not unlike WikkaWiki. MediaWiki also looks nice.

Answer 23

Whilst browsing, I found a wizard on Wikimatrix that allows you to select an appropriate wiki. Many of the wikis already mentioned came up. This was very helpful as the questions are relavent and not too technical.

Answer 24

Anyone have a way to convert existing trac wiki pages to redmine format? Redmine's is easy to learn, but unfortunately, there is no real standard wiki format, a real drawback for those who have to work in more than one.

Answer 25

I'd have to agree with Ewan that Redmine is great if you plan to host the wiki yourself. I got it up and running at work in less than a day (primarily was fighting other aspects of the server that took the longest). Really simple to configure and if you need to point it at a back end authentication store (like Active Directory) it's really simple.

Answer 26

TWiki is cool I think :)

Answer 27

MoinMoin is a good choice. why?

• python + open source / easy to install / secure / no db but flat files
• lots of macro / themes /plugins depending on your usage scenario from a personal wiki to a blog to a conventional webserver. you can write latex, insert lots of different languages using parsers.
• you thesaurize all your stuff in one place

Answer 28

LionWiki is great for a really small deployments. Almost zero-conf - it uses file storage so all installation is copying ONE (38 KB) file on your FTP and create one writable directory.

If you want more funkcionality, there are some plugins too.