This is the canonical list of WikiEngines. See also TheWikiWay (a book). The engines are listed thrice, with different ordering. (I actually only see them listed twice, once by language, and once by name.
The definition of a wiki is covered on the wiki.org site.
Wiki is in Ward’s original description:
The simplest online database that could possibly work.
Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has a simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group communication mechanisms in that it allows the organization of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
Like many simple concepts, “open editing” has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a Web site is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by nontechnical users.
“Ward” refers to Ward Cunningham who invented this concept in 1995 and named it Wiki-wiki after the Hawaiian term for fast. Anyone who has ever been to Honolulu knows this term since it the name of the bus line that runs from the airport. It has been shortened by the community to simply Wiki. Essentially it is a fast way to do online collaboration that people seem to enjoy. In fact, it most closely resembles concepts developed by conceptualist Neil Larson back in the 1980’s when he developed an outliner for computers and went off into a concept called knowledge annealing. Neil, a one-time serious Mormon elder who got rich selling mail-order diamonds suddenly had a change of plans and went into acting after a stint selling software. I’m not sure if this had anything to do with it but he became a freak over the teachings of Edward de Bono. I hear from him about once every 3 years when he calls to tell me something weird then he disappears again. He was kind of a troubled genius who would be perfect to add dimension to some of these new concepts.
