Are you looking for an easy way to collaborate with research colleagues online without getting bogged down with software bells and whistles? A wiki might be the solution for you. Here we review five wiki platforms that range from free, open source solutions to more expensive, hosted solutions. The trade off comes mainly from the development time involved in setting up and managing your wiki.
Wikispaces: Wikispaces is an easy to use collaboration system that can be used privately for a fee or open to the public for free (as long as you don't mind seeing Google text ads on the side). All it takes is a simple username, password, email address and wikiname to get started with a free account. Universities can enjoy unlimited users for a flat rate. Columbia University created Wikischolars on the Wikispaces platform for its university faculty and research scientists.
PBworks: PBworks (formerly known as PBwiki) offers a free wiki with the option of creating a private collaboration space, which isn't available in the Wikispaces free edition. New wikis come with sample pages that you can use as best practice samples for setting up pages such as a document repository, a meeting minutes page, a project tracker, and more. Cal Newport at Study Hacks has a helpful and detailed post on How to Build a Paper Research Wiki using PBworks.
MediaWiki: MediaWiki is a free wiki engine and was the original wiki engine for Wikipedia. MediaWiki runs on PHP and MySQL and is designed to be scalable enough to handle millions of page views per day. If you're familiar with Wikipedia, you already have an idea of what MediaWiki can do.
TikiWiki: TikiWiki is an open source wiki engine and overall content management system. Added features include forums, chat rooms, polls, blogs, image galleries, and more. While TikiWiki has the advantage of being free and open source, it may require more development time than you would prefer. If that is the case, you might be better off with a hosted solution like Wikispaces or PBworks.
TiddlyWiki: TiddlyWiki is a rather odd micro wiki engine written in javascript that creates a single HTML file that you can store on your harddisk or even a pendrive. This gives you the advantage of being able to update it offline, but also limits the design and functionality. Since all of the content exists on a single page, clicking a headline in the navigation makes the page scroll to show you the specific content. TiddlyWikis can be combined to create collaborative wikis at TiddlySpot.