How do I make my Web site a wiki?

I suppose I should come clean right up front and say that I am not a huge fan of wikis because I have found that the benefit of a totally egalitarian content system is offset by the uncontrolled ...

The first challenge is to figure out which Wiki application to use. Since you already mentioned Wikipedia, it doesn't take much effort to find out that it's run on a wiki application called Mediawiki. That might be overkill for you, but it's a terrific application, but you should note on their site the warning: "Do not install MediaWiki unless you intend to keep up with security upgrades."

Other popular wiki apps include Twiki, Socialtext Wiki, and SWiK. If you want more choices, it's probably quite appropriate that Wikipedia has a great list of wiki software you can peruse.

For my own project, a wiki that I put at Brainjam.info, I chose PmWiki.

To get started, jump to the download page. On that page you can grab the app either as a .tgz or a .zip file, your choice. Since I'm using Linux and can handle modern archive formats, I chose the .tgz file.

(don't use the above URL, though, go through the Download page so that you get the latest version rather than the one I have here, which will quickly go out of date)

To unpack this is easy: gunzip *tgz followed by tar -x. Now you can see what's going on:

Next step? Move into the newly created directory, and you'll find that there's a file README.txt that's a good first step. Mostly it says "go read the docs/INSTALL.txt" file, which we do.

That details the steps needed to get this going, which is summarized as "open up the file pmwiki.php with your Web browser", which you can find by opening up the directory into which you just installed the software. Here's what you'll see:

What you want to launch is the file pmwiki.php. I do so, and, predictably, get an error:

The latter solution sounds good, so that's what I'll do.

Now things are looking great:

That's all there is to it for the basic wiki installation. Not bad at all.

Of course, there are a million ways you can customize things with headers, footers, new graphics, skins, and much more, but we'll leave that for now.