PB and other wikis

I just created a wiki with PBwiki, a wiki service aimed at businesses and educators. It seems pretty restrictive and suggests that I upgrade to the pay version to get > 10MB of space, but that is probably sufficient for many people. One particularly cute feature of PBwiki is the ability to save any given page as a PDF.

Not only am I a big fan of (and frequent contributor to) Wikipedia, I also have found its underlying software, MediaWiki, to be very usable. It is free and open-source, so you can just download it, install it, and have a featureful wiki which you have total control over. (Having control over my software and computing environment is a big deal for me.) MediaWiki appears to be pretty commonly used. Some other MediaWiki sites that I have used include The Muppet Wiki, The DLXS Documentation Wiki, The Guild Wars Wiki, and of course our internal department wiki.

We set up the wiki about two years ago and have used it for various things, including gathering meeting agenda items, composing documents collaboratively and sharing current events on a News section on the front page. Mostly we use it to document our current processes, workflow and status of our equipment. It's very useful to have everyone create pages on topics of their expertise and experience, and to be able to search it! Today I added documentation on setting up samba accounts so that our students can access volumes on our storage drives from their Windows accounts.

I have tried a few other pieces of wiki software, including EditThisPage and TikiWiki, and found Tiddlywiki to be particularly interesting. It is a very cute and powerful one-file wiki you can install on your desktop and add features to with specialized plugins called "tiddlers". As I tend not to stick to just one computer (or domain even) for my work, I will likely stick with MediaWiki for my wiki needs.