You should know about MediaWiki before using wiki engines

Before we get down to starting on wiki engines (and wikis in general), I would like to take a minute to present a case in point—the wiki that started it all.

Wikipedia
The free encyclopedia that anyone can edit is the slogan of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a great online resource center for everyone and every purpose. It is the biggest multilingual encyclopedia available online, containing over 2 million articles and still growing. You won't be surprised to hear that many of us have first heard the term wiki from the site Wikipedia. Have you ever wondered what software is managing such a huge number of articles and performing flawlessly? The software is none other than MediaWiki, a wiki engine that manages wiki site. Now let's see what a wiki means.

Wiki
A wiki is a browser-based collaborative writing environment, in which a community may amass and exchange information on particular topics, and to which anyone may contribute without having web programming skills. In other words, a wiki is a piece of software that is used for collaborative content creation. Different people have different ideas about what a wiki really is, but whichever definition we take, a wiki is software that handles complex problems in a
simple manner.

According to Leuf and Cunningham, the creators of the original wiki concept, "a wiki is a freely expandable collection of interlinked web pages, a hypertext system for storing and modifying information—a database, where each page can easily be edited by any user with a forms-capable web browser client". The content can be directly linked to that found in other wikis and in web documents.

In many situations, we need something collaborative on the Internet. We should be able to contribute to a particular discussion and ensure that everyone has the ability to participate. Wiki gives us this opportunity and flexibility to perform such tasks. To use a wiki, we do not have to be a webmaster or have knowledge about web programming. We do not need any special software for that. Just open a web browser, go to a wiki site and start writing. We neither have to wait for a webmaster to upload our contents and share with others, nor do we have to wait for any administrator to approve our contents to be shown. We can do it ourselves instantly.