What wiki should I run on my own host?

I’ve recently done some evaluation of the choices. It really depends on what your critical needs are. 3 questions to narrow the field:
1) How many people will be using it, just you?
2) Will you be attaching files? A lot?
3) Do you need data structure, or just blank pages on which to format content?
Any additional info on what sort of information you’ll be storing would be useful too.

Good follow up questions, thanks.

1) There will be 5 people using this
2) We won’t be attaching files. Actually, it would be great if making links to documents on a server somewhere was easy. I can’t think of how that would happen, so it’s probably hard.
3) Data structure is not super important, this will mostly be free form.

I think of this mostly as a place where we store our collective info about a series of different locations and people. Not really a crm but not too far off I guess…

Well, given those, I’d recommend MediaWiki. It’s easy to setup, and folks are familiar with its functionality since it’s the engine under Wikipedia. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

As for links to a filesystem, I think the biggest hurdle in an ad-hoc setup is consistent syntax, and local vs. remote filesharing. If you are all using Windows and are all local (or VPN//RDC connected to the same local network) then you just need a shared volume that you all map to the same drive letter, like X: Then links in the wiki can just be X:/servershare/directory/filename.xxx. There’s a similar AFP syntax for Mac users.

I’m less help with remote scenarios. I’m sure others here have more info there.

I would also recommend checking out TiddlyWiki. I’ve only played with it a a little, but the inline, flexible nature seems like an improvement over traditional wikis.

Here’s a fancy example of a tiddlywiki: http://www.osmosoft.com/
Here’s another normal example: http://tiddlythemes.com/empties/GTD.html

These are both not editable by the public, but just replace “view” with “edit” to see how it works. It’s all inline and in javascript so it’s super easy to setup—just host one file.

Out of wikis I’m familiar with (I haven’t checked out TiddlyWiki) I think MediaWiki fits the situation best (as I already said) but I have to put in a plug for TWiki on general principle. Good WYSIWYG editing, no DP necessary (uses Perl and RCS) and excellent file-attachment. Plus its a structured wiki, so there’s a level more complexity you can add beyond styled page contents. www.twiki.org