I’m with you– what matters is the content. After that, the best wiki engine is the one that you are using (which implies you know enough about it to make it useful and it does the things you need it to do)!

It’s the same with pretty much every technology isn’t it? Sometimes tech smackdowns are fun, but most of the time the people worrying over it are those who haven’t put anything into any of them, like the scrawny kid in the gym who has yet to lift a weight arguing about which lifting program is going to pump him up…

Though I try to provide a solid “professional” answer, the truth is, the answer is really “just because”. I started using PBwiki because several other people whose work I like were using PBwiki. I can’t tell you which is the best because I haven’t used the others as much. I can only say why I like the one I use–for example the ability to add students to my wikis even if they don’t have email accounts, which is often the case with my student population (Adult Basic Education, GED, & adult ESL). And the embedding of widgets is slick, as is their new Document Management system. I’ve thought about building wikis on other services just to learn more about them, but I’d rather spend my time making my existing wikis better.

I’m happy to hear that I’m not the only one who gets these questions and doesn’t have a rock-hard answer!