List of Wiki Engines

(The Varieties of Wiki Experience)

While WikiIndex lists scores of wiki engines, I wanted to narrow down the list of wiki engines to those that have widespread use or prominent implementations.

All of the wiki engines listed below except for Everything2 are free and open source

Wiki Engine	Description	Top Wiki
Bitweaver	CMS related to TikiWiki; written in PHP; modular; high traffic, custom web development.	VOIP-Info
Clearspace	Jive Software; written in Java;	BBC newsforums CNet
CLiki	Written in Common Lisp;	TUNES Wiki
Corendal	Corendal; written in Java; no wiki syntax to learn, a WYSIWYG rich text editor is used instead	collaborative
DokuWiki	Splitbrain Software; written in PHP;	Romapedia mostly collaborative
Everything2	Custom Wiki for Everything Development Company; programming language probably Perl	Everything2
JAMWiki	Written in Java; feature parity with MediaWiki	OLAT
MediaWiki	Open source; most widely used; developed specifically for Wikipedia. Written in PHP;	1911Encyclopedia Althistory AnswerWiki Banknote Wiki C Language CFD Wiki Chainki Changemakers Christianity KB Corpsknowpedia SourceWatch Uncyclopedia Wikipedia
MoinMoin	Written in Python;	Edubuntu FedoraProject GnomeLiveWiki Handhelds.org Python TechnoratiDeveloper Ubuntu
PmWiki	Written in PHP; mostly used for non-reference sites;	CenterForestResearch ITmission (Linux) Leo Laporte
PukiWiki	Japanese; written in PHP;	Mostly Japanese
TiddlyWiki	Written in JavaScript; weak on anti-spam, other security features; no preview; entire site stored in a single HTML file (that's how it's possible to be written in JavaScript)	BoliviaWiki Reasoning Well
Xwiki	Written in Java; enterprise wiki used mainly in France	collaborative

"Collaborative" means that users have used their installations on organization intranets, as opposed to general access reference wikis.

BitWeaver and MediaWiki are database-oriented; the other wiki engines listed above are file-oriented. The difference is that, with a file-oriented wiki engine, each entry is its own file. In contrast, with a database, each entry is a record in a table belonging to the backend.

I was interested in some of the various alternatives, one of which was the commercial wiki engine Clearspace ($29/user). There I was surprised to learn that the BBC website is (evidently) powered by this product. Clearspace is written in Java, which is very interesting to me for several reasons I'll discuss later. Another product that I thought looks attractive is Corendal.

---

SOURCES & ADDITIONAL READING: Gmap Package, Bitweaver organization; Wiki Popularity results, Wiki Creole; Comparison of WikiEngines (results for this table), WikiMatrix;