Looking for Windows Wiki Software?

Wikidpad on Windows

WikidPad is an open-source standalone wiki notebook/outliner for Windows with plenty of features, such as dynamic tree generation, topic tagging, auto-completion, etc.

What is a Wiki?

A wiki is a many-person, user editable website. Wikis are composed of web pages you can write on, enabling fast and easy collaboration.

The word "wiki" comes from a Hawaiian word for "fast". Wikis have become the collaboration tool of choice because of their ease and flexibility.

Most wikis today require technical skill to install and use, while others are hosted by companies, typically in a limited fashion for free and with additional features for a monthly fee.

Google recently acquired Jotspot so I don't feel comfortable recomending them yet until we see what they do with it. I suspect it will be great though (unless you want to control the content on your servers and maybe if you want your own domain name.. otherwise you'll be good I suspect. It always was a hosted solution).

BackPackIt, not as nice as JotSpot, but also offers a free version, though the free tool is very restricted. The for fee versions seem to give a lot for the money.

I recommend Central Desktop for Collaboration of all kinds. If the purpose of your wiki is collaboration (and a hosted solution works for you) then this is the way to go. BusinessWeek magazine voted it the “Best of the Web” for collaboration tools late last year. If your company is at all involved with Slaesforce.com then all the mroe reason to go this route and they integrate well.

http://www.mediawiki.org/ This is the Wiki that powers Wikipedia. It is free, open source and robust but in my experience, unless you have killer hardware and fast netwrking (or if the MySQL DB is on the same box) it is prohibitively slow. it is an "Enterprise class" wiki, but you need an admin. This solution probably isn't for new users or small uncommitted shops. It definately isn't a turnkey solution.

http://twiki.org/ is a free, open source Wiki in the spirit of mediaWiki. Very powerful, but you need to download, install, maintain yada yada as with mediaWiki. It's not really that hard, but it's not a turnkey solution.

http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/ Small time wiki in php. Doesn't necessarily need MySQL but scales better with a DB. But if you're interested in scaling well and willing to do an install and run php / mySQL, you'd be better off with MediaWiki or Twiki.