Tim Wang has posted a nice comparison of Wiki applications. Wiki is a great buzzword. Its a buzzword because people use it without really knowing what it means. A wiki is a web-based document collaboration tool. One of its defining features is its document version history. This will be familiar to software developers where version control has a long pedigree. It should also be familiar to anyone who has used the Track Changes feature of MS Word. MS Word also now allows remote web-based collaboration. Seeing who did what and when makes gives an organic property to a document. It also gives it authenticity. And of course control.

The simplest, cheapest and quickest way to collaborate on something could be Google documents . The Wiki comparison above found that a WSIWG editor was one of the crucially required features. Google documents and MS Word give you very familiar and usable interfaces. For spawning Wikipedia the wiki must take a bow but lets not get hung up on a word.