What Wiki should I use?

I'm adding this to my blog today because I've gotten the question three times in the past two days so it seemed like a good time to summarize things.

The first part of the question usually is "Where can I set up a wiki so my students and I can try this out?" My experience has led me to two places where you can do this for free: Seedwiki.com and Xwiki.com Both are free and give you enough room to get a decent sized project going. Both have recently upgraded their offerings as they now also support commercial clients. Another interesting one is WikiSpaces, although I have not tried this one. The other free wiki space that gets a lot of coverage is JotSpot. I've only gotten a site and dabbled a bit, but it is less straightforward and less wiki-like for my tastes.

The second part of the question usually is "We'd like to host our own wikis here. What software should we use?" Over the past year OET has tried out a few different pieces of software. Our criteria included easy editing, representative of the common wiki conventions, relatively simple to install and maintain, and free.

At this point, we are using PMWiki on our IIS server. This also requires Perl and we are using the free version of ActivePerl.

The definitive answer to all of this is really the definition of wiki at Wikipedia. This will also lead you to the WikiBook project and the Wiki Science: How to Start a Wiki book. The beauty of this, of course, is that since these are wikis, the community keeps them up-to-date!