Own wiki A copy of my reply to your question on the Village pump in case you did not see it If you want to run your own MediaWiki based wiki you or someone who works for you or on your behalf such as a system administrator should read everything linked under WP EIW MediaWiki The more you know about what you re doing before you start the easier it will be Setting up your own wiki and making it work is a nontrivial task It s relatively easy to download and install MediaWiki but what you get is a very bare bones wiki which lacks many features you will sorely miss if you have much experience editing on a well developed wiki such as Wikipedia So you have to learn about how to port features from Wikipedia to your own wiki Then the software is only half the challenge the other half is to build your user community Wikipedia is by comparison an online paradise because here we have thousands of skilled motivated and benevolent users When you start a new wiki from scratch you face a chicken and egg problem your wiki will suck until you have an established community of expert users to make everything nice but until you get that community few people will want to join your wiki because it will suck It s very hard for a new wiki to get over that initial hurdle Obviously it helps if you already have a few dozen expert wiki users who want to join your project but if you did then I suspect you would not need to ask here for advice But don t let this discourage you lots of people have faced these problems and overcome them You just have to be smart and determined Perhaps the easiest way to get started experimenting on your own is to set up a Wiki on a stick for which you only need your own computer without the complications of working on a server You can also use the wiki on a stick method to make local working backup copies of your wiki when you get it running on a server This protects you and your users against catastrophic loss of data This type of question comes up on the Help desk from time to time you can read some previous answers with this search