OpenSourceSoftware

10 Free Wiki Platforms & Engines

3 Mins read

Want to create your own wiki? You can easily host your own wiki website (like wikipedia) and allow many people to create content for you.

In short, Wiki is a website that allows users to modify or create them on the basis of collaboration. You may have already heard of the most famous wiki website, Wikipedia, which offers the users with a cornucopia of information. To be precise, wiki software is collaborative software which lets the visitors to modify or edit its content. Wikis can be generally edited through a normal web browser and runs on one or more web servers.

Wikis are created specifically for assisting a large section of the society without any business intention.

How To Create Your Own Wikipedia

Creating your own wikipedia like site is easy. You just need a wiki engine that can be hosted on a hosting provider.

Wiki platforms and engines are prebuilt software that can be used to create wiki websites. Many popular websites operate on this type of tools, including wikipedia. Wiki engines are mostly contributed by open source communities. The wiki engines have existed for long time therefore quality of these software is really good.

There are numerous wiki engines, but here in this article I have mentioned some of the best among them.

MediaWiki

A free open source software, MediaWiki was originally written for use in Wikipedia in PHP. It is translated into a number of languages (around 300), but the primary documentation is in English. There are a number of extensions and plug-ins for MediaWiki which will enable you to create your website. Though it does not feature a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor, there is an extension to enable it.

PM Wiki

This wiki platform is completely customisable and is coded in PHP under GPL. It can be used for collaborative maintenance and creation of websites. Some of the features of this wiki software are:

  • Quick customization
  • Password protection for the entire site, groups of pages or a single page
  • Hundreds of other features available through extensions and plug-ins

DokuWiki

Popular among its users for its clean and readable syntax, DokuWiki provides easy backup, maintenance and integration. It features, in-built access controls and authentication connectors. Some important features of this wiki engine are:

  • Device independent
  • Locking to avoid edit conflicts
  • Easy navigation through breadcrumbs
  • Full UTF-8 support
  • No database is required

TWiki

TWiki is another powerful, flexible and easy-to-use enterprise collaboration platform which can be used to run a document management tool, a knowledge base or any other groupware tool on the internet, extranet or intranet. The best thing about TWiki is that any person without any programming skills can also create a web application.

WikkaWiki

WikkaWiki (also known as Wikka) is a lightweight wiki engine built using PHP. PHP community contribution is breathtaking. Specifically in terms of content management systems.

It uses MySQl to store pages and is a 100% web-based installer/upgrader. Powered with easy page editing features, users can upload and download multimedia easily.

XWiki

XWiki can be used both as a first generation or second generation, to collaborate on content or create collaborative web applications. XWiki provides the perfect infrastructure to develop small applications. It is developed in Java under the model of PGPL open source license and is a great source for data based applications.

MoinMoin Wiki

MoinMoin is an advanced wiki platform, written in Python, with a large community of users. It provides easy-to-use and extensible wiki engine. Some of the features of the MoinMoin Wiki are:

  • Unicode support
  • Access control lists
  • Modular authentication
  • Enhanced search function

Wikia

It is a free open source web hosting site which lets users to create beautiful and easily editable wiki websites on their own servers. Wikia also allows users to embed ad codes on the websites created by them and offers categories.

BoltWire

BoltWire helps users to create beautifully customisable and interactive websites without even needing to learn programming. The philosophy of the wiki platform can be summarised as – simple, small, secure and strong. It is coded in PHP and uses simple text file systems.

MojoMojo

MojoMojo is a wiki engine developed in Perl language and is becoming widely popular due to its basic structures. Its storage system is 100% MySQL driven. It has a bunch of features like automatic creation of web gallery of your photos, live AJAX previews as you are editing your text and in-built full-text search engine.

Hasib is a foodie and an avid reader with the same voracious appetite. He is interested in the current trends in job market and time to time writes on naukri.com about job opportunities in IT industry for fresher and experienced professionals.  Reach him on Twitter | Google+ | LinkedIn

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