MediaWiki, Create Your Own Wikipedia - Free

A lot of people out there love Wikipedia, for it's wealthy of information and ease of use. Did you know that you can make your own Wiki like Wikipedia? Did you know that you can use the same software as them too? It's true. On top of all of that, it's free.

MediaWiki is a free web-based wiki software, which is also used by all the projects for the Wikimedia Foundation, and It is written in PHP. The software is able to handle projects with several terabytes of content, which for those who have no idea what a terabyte is, it's the next step up from gigabyte (1,000 megabytes equals a gigabyte, 1,000 gigabytes equals a terabyte). The software is also highly customizable with more than 600 settings, and more than 1,500 extensions.

It is one of the most easiest software applications that I have ever used, and at the same time it's very valuable concerning filing and keeping track of information - of all types. I have used it in the past for wiki site that kept track of gemstones, and it was very simple to get up and going. I literally was up and running within the first thirty minutes, and on top of that I had the entire website skinned within the next few hours, including setting up the placements for advertising.

So if your wondering why your seeing a lot of websites popping up all over the place that look like Wikipedia in style, this is the reason. I've noticed an increasing trend of many websites using this technology and creating some wonderful things!

When I was at my last job, which was at an engineering firm, we had a lot of different things to keep track of - and I mean a lot. This was one of the methods that I was going to introduce to them to keep track of everything that was going on, which includes the individual projects that we were working on. All of this would have been offline, but instead on the company's intranet, so it's nice and safely concealed on the network servers only.