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I'm a big fan of Pmwiki, it is file based so you are not trying to get your data out of a DB if something goes wrong, and it scales well. It also has a pretty good variety of plug-ins to extend functionality.
Installation is a breeze.

Agree, and would even go further, applying it to even small sites: Scaling or not, self-contained CMS is the way to go for me, unless I wanted a very fancy site. Edit from anywhere, any OS, no local installation of tools, focus on content.

I personally like PmWiki, but there are a plethora of options, of course.

In pmwiki, you can include LaTeX math with this:

http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/JsMath

I've used it for some time and highly recommend it

We use PmWiki for all of our system documentation. It allows for the ease of use and wide accessibility of web based documentation, but it is also dirt simple to install and run (no database to worry about) so that it can be put on a thumb drive or dumped to a PDF for portability. It also has a simple, solid mark-up language that lends itself to importing plain text notes.

It sucks to have your documentation "go down" when you need it. That could happen with a more complex wiki, but would be highly unlikely with PmWiki.

You can use plain text or formatted HTML to create pages (attachments are easy to add) and it's easy to organize pages into an outline or (surprise!) a course format. Moodle also lets you set up forums, wiki's and so on.

Wiki's are good, but it takes some work to organize the pages. I like to create an "index page" for ease of navigation. You can do this with wiki trails in PmWiki http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/PmWiki/WikiTrails

In MoinMoin http://moinmo.in/ you can use Categories to group pages.

With Moodle and wiki's, authorized users can edit the pages, including data in tables. which can be handy.

For personal notes,you might try:Tuxcards http://www.tuxcards.de/, KeepNote http://rasm.ods.org/keepnote/(it easily handles screenshots or other images),Jreepad http://jreepad.sourceforge.net/ a plain-text-only outliner, or BasketNotePads http://basket.kde.org/. Like Tuxcards, Basket can export its contents to an HTML tree, which can be posted for others.

If you are adventurous, use a mindmap, such as FreeMind http://freemind.sourceforge.net/.

I would recommend NOT using any special software like a wiki for your primary documentation. It should be simple and printable, and not need a special server set up to access/use your docs in case of a disaster recovery situation.

Getting your average wiki up and running from scratch should be pretty simple:

1. You'll need something like a LAMP stack. You've probably got at least one LAMP box left, even if your whole datacenter burnt to the ground. If push comes to shove, you can set up a package like MAMP or Apache2Triad on a desktop with zero-effort -- we're talking a half dozen mouse clicks through an installer, and you're done.
2. Many wikis (e.g., PMWiki) don't even require a database -- they use a file-based datastore. Unpack your gzip'd and tar'd backup of your wiki directory, and you're done
3. Okay, so maybe you chose a heavier-duty wiki, like MediaWiki. Ungzip your database backup, and dump it into mysql. Now you're really done

Version control, edit history, and ease of connecting documents make wikis vastly superior to a directory full of Microsoft Word documents.

For me, KB is not really a pure category. More of a hybrid that fits somewhere
between/within a ContentMgmtSys and a DocMgmtSys

You mention mediawiki, which I feel is quite impressive, as a collaborative CMS.
If mediawiki is overly-complex then maybe a different one would work better:
http://twiki.org/
http://www.splitbrain.org/projects/dokuwiki
http://moinmo.in/
http://www.pmwiki.org/

OTOH, if yo mean a KB that is concerned about DocMgmt, then you probably know that
many Document Managements Systems, though ofter synonomous with a "Knowledge Base Systems" (KBS), but probably contain better features related to lifecycle management for documents,
  publication workflow and access rights management.
http://www.alfresco.com/
http://www.knowledgetree.com/
http://www.epiware.com/
http://www.jaspersoft.com/
http://www.jivesoftware.com/clearspace/
is not free for use, but I've deployed it and can say 1st hand its worth mentioning;
you can download a free 30-day trial for evaluation.

You'll still need apache+PHP, but I've found PmWiki an acceptable "flat-file" solution. If you want it to work standalone, you'll need a tid bit of technical knowhow to deploy it.

As far as an evaluation goes: the markup is a bit funky (but not troublesome), deployment is cake (but you need to edit a config file), and mods exist for "neat" functionality (syntax highlighting, additional styles). That said, it seems a bit sluggish at times, and the documentation targets the "beta" version.

Hope this helps!

You'll still need apache+PHP, but I've found PmWiki an acceptable "flat-file" solution. If you want it to work standalone, you'll need a tid bit of technical knowhow to deploy it.

As far as an evaluation goes: the markup is a bit funky (but not troublesome), deployment is cake (but you need to edit a config file), and mods exist for "neat" functionality (syntax highlighting, additional styles). That said, it seems a bit sluggish at times, and the documentation targets the "beta" version.

Hope this helps!

For a light weight PHP-based (ugh, I know, but every hosting service supports it and it's really easy to whip up plug-ins) wiki, it's hard to beat PMWiki. Their default template is XHTML too, which is nice.

I had this same problem recently and came up with PmWiki's bug tracking solution. Small, Wiki based, nice looking. Slightly complicated to set up but not anything like TRAC (I recently set this up and it was a nightmare). http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/PITS In the comments thread there are some updated versions that include decent installation instructions. You can check out my installation of it here: http://mcquay.org/bugs/ Hope this helps.

Pm

It is... The code is available at:

http://www.pmwiki.org/pmwiki/uploads/Cookbook/mlin k.php

I used PmWiki because it was really easy to initialize. There were some automated wikispam attacks, so I configured it to require a password (which humans can easily figure out) for editing. (The site doesn't have lots of people watching for vandalism and repairing it. I'm not worried about manual vandalism. Nor do I want to futz around with configuring the box to send e-mail, apart from sending OS-level messages to root@localhost.)

I might someday look into using Zope and/or Plone to administer my other main site, which is somewhat more substantial, and currently implemented in manual HTML + CSS. It contains a few info submission forms using a FrontPage extension, though. I'm not hot on the idea of re-engineering those, nor the idea of doing anything more than FTP uploads to what I assume is a yucky IIS box.

In case anyone is interested:

Larger site

Smaller site