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I use a wiki. Specifically, I use OpenWikiNG, http://sourceforge.net/projects/openwiki-ng/ , however, any wiki software would work. My reason for using OpenWikiNG is that I largely use windows and the software is ASP based and can work with a simple Access database. The way I have it setup, and in hindsight, I would do this differently now, is that I use the personal web server that comes with Windows on my personal home desktop. With the access database, I don't have to worry about some heavy database engine. Since I'm the only user, this has been a very stable setup and trivially easy to migrate to a new machine when needed. Another reason I use OpenWikiNG is that it's open source, very simple, and somewhat easy to hack. It works for me, and that's all I care about.

With wake on LAN capability, I can VPN into my home network and wake my machine if I need remote access. And since this is a wiki, I don't have to install any software on any other device. All I need is a web browser.

In terms of usage, I have my wiki start page as my browser's home page. I have links to site I visit often, some RSS feeds, my daily schedule, even some emails and phone numbers. I use the wiki as sort of a second brain. I have pages where I put my ideas, pages where I put things that are important, things I might need, and all sorts of other resources from computers to food. My personal wiki is a much better bookmarking system than what any browser could ever come up with. I can easily annotate information that I add, and most importantly, I can search.

To give the benefit of my hindsight, I would probably want to use a dedicated LAMP server on my home network. And I would consider something with better file and image management, as OpenWikiNG really sucks at that. To really find something that would suit one's personal taste, I suggest looking at http://www.wikimatrix.org/ to compare them. I have a lot of stuff in my personal wiki, and converting it to some other format really seems like a hassle. So, if you do this, pick a wiki you're comfortable with. The more time you spend using it, the more you lock yourself in.

Your equation is ActiveDevelopers + LargeUserbase = Success.

But as I've already said, a successful software project also needs leadership. I've seen many projects, both open source and proprietary, fall apart because nobody's doing the boring scutwork: fixing bugs, integrating changes, documenting stuff. Left to themselves, developers will spend all their time implementing kewl new features and ignoring the necessary scutwork.

I agree that the Theony's enterprise will probably go nowhere. But that's no guarantee that the fork group will inherit all of TWiki's users. As a TWiki implementor and admin, I already had a lot of issues with the software even before this crisis. To gain my loyalty, the fork would have to not just recreate all the functionality of TWiki, but actually deal with its many problems. Otherwise the next time I need a major functionality upgrade, I'll bite the bullet and move to a new platform. It's not like I don't have a lot of options.

I found the extensions very useful: I used a slightly modified LDAP Extension to integrate with the MS Active Directory used here (in a non-standard way).

yes looked at some commercial wikis (like confluence) and J2EE based options. A big plus for mediawiki is that most users are familiar with wikipedia even if they haven't ever contributed to it. For thos evaluating, I found wikimatrix a useful place to start - although, paper exercises are no subsitute to trying the stuff out.

• Start with only one area of the business and get it done well. News will spread and everyone will want to be on board.
• Only deal with one individual from each part of the business. This centralises control and keeps some focus. If it's small and that means you then all the better.
• Certainly do not keep information on the wiki that is likely to go out of date any time soon. Wiki's are best at creating lots of relatively static documents that can be easily corrected and added to. You don't want to be changing minute critical details on the same pages constantly, such as keeping contacts, products, or business transactions. That is crazy! That's what business databases are for and they're far superior for many obvious reasons.
• Look to similar on-line wikis for structural concepts. Wikipedia, Wikibooks are good starting points. Link to the "empty" documents you want to create later as part of the early structural creation process.
• Avoid utilising extraordinarily special wiki features too often as they often become cumbersome to maintain and will scare away many novice users at which the page may be aimed.
• Be sure and test the wiki features out with several browsers!
• Add the documents that are immediately usable first; don't just add them for the sake of completion. This will save you time and increase the return on time invested.

If you need to decide which Wiki you want to use this site may be of help: http://www.wikimatrix.org/

It allows you to compare the features of over 50 Wiki Engines. My personal favourite is of course DokuWiki http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:dokuwiki but your mileage may vary.

There are many different Wikis available. All with different pros and cons. To compare them all is the aim of the WikiMatrix project. If you are not sure which Wiki is best for you, WikiMatrix offers a Wiki choice wizard.

If you are (or someone you know is) moderately familiar with Perl, I would highly recommend http://twiki.org/ over MediaWiki.

TWiki supports standard XHTML 1.0 in combination with traditional wiki-style markup (e.g., *important text* for bold in TWiki as opposed to '''important text''' as bold in MediaWiki).

TWiki runs via standard CGI scripts and uses an RCS back-end for tracking document revisions and facilitating roll-backs.

TWiki was designed to support a thorough plug-in architecture and a great deal of the functionality included in the latest stable release (TWiki-4.0.1 from 07 Feb 2006) is provided through plug-ins.

There are lots of skins too (driven by CSS) which are easy to install if you don't like the default.

I've recently gotten into deploying and administrating installations of both TWiki and MediaWiki. I have also been modifying lots of the code of each while working in Sony's R&D department. Management decided to abandon MediaWiki (and possibly also Confluence shortly) in favor of TWiki's advantages. I'm working on some specialized new plug-ins for our intranet to aid project management. I highly recommend TWiki for collaborative web pages where you might want to extend the functionality.

MediaWiki is simple and clean and very well-suited to encyclopedic content. If that fits your problem-domain (i.e., you don't need to make substantial functional enhancements), it is a nearly ideal choice.

This http://wikimatrix.org/compare/MediaWiki+TWiki site can be extremely helpful in evaluating wiki alternatives too.

I hope that helps. =)

-Pip