pawnzo,

  The wiki you want is Deki Wiki.  Deki Wiki is an open source wiki, deployable as a VMware Certified Virtual Image, that fits all of your requirements.  You are accurate in your assumption that the first three criteria are common.  The fourth criteria is handled in Deki Wiki through its numerous dissection of RSS feeds, ranging from an RSS feed for a whole wiki down to an individual contributor. 

Deki Wiki can be downloaded for free here: http://wiki.mindtouch.com/Deki_Wiki

If you have any questions feel free to contact us here: http://www.mindtouch.com/support

I work for Atlassian, makers of Confluence, my opinion is slightly biased, but rather than just say "try Confluence" I'll put it this way: I would review all the "enterprise" wikis on the list. Deki, Confluence, SocialText, and there are a few others. Those are the ones that have the features and are appropriate for the type of office work you're talking about. Good luck with the search.

It looks like MediaWiki also meets your request, I suspect DokuWki does to. I've included links to Wikipedia's help files (they use and maintain MediaWiki, an open source wiki):

1. The ability for anyone in a single department to build and update documentation

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: … _Wikipedia You may also want to look at this article on MediaWiki that discusses preventing user access because permissions is something MediaWiki is weak on when compared to DokuWiki, DekiWiki, Confluence, & SocialText: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Preventing_access If you need the ability to decide who can or cannot edit an article on an article by article basis then MediaWiki is not what you are looking for (there are hacks but the default install does not come with anything like that).

2. The ability to link to external sources for documents that either for security reasons or incompatibilities are not appropriate for Wiki (eg visio docs)

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Links

3. The ability to alert the person who first generated a document that it has been updated

MeadiaWiki's watchlist feature is really slick. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Watching_pages

4. The ability to report on who has updated and who has generated new docs

There are numerous ways of doing this in Mediawiki, see: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Log and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges Also, there are extensions like the one that created this report on recent changes: http://www.organicdesign.co.nz/Special:Recentchanges

MediaWiki is an easy install, you can take it for a test run on your desktop:
http://lifehacker.com/software/wikipedi … 163707.php

Installing it on a LAMP configuration is even easier. Simply create a database, assign a user to your database, upload the files and run the web install. Doing updates (which come on a quartely basis) is just as easy, even when there are changes to the database.

So far i've had around 5 or 6 Virtual Appliances running and I got doku wiki and mediawiki running on an IIS virtual machine. 

Tried:
Prespective
DekiWiki
Twiki
MediaWiki
Confluence
DokuWiki

Either i'm not doing something right or there just isn't something right going, the majority of the appliances a lot of the buttons don't work or I come up w/ a lot of script errors, but thats not really what i'm looking for.

The two that stand out the most in this list for my project (Small knowledge management for about 40 people) would be doku wiki or media wiki.  The one and only problem is that it has no workflow to it, but then I started reading more about the heart of a wiki. And the heart of the wiki is being able to create and modify documents on the fly w/ no traditional owner, you put in a workflow aspect to the wiki, then you may as well just e-mail the author yourself w/ your adjustment and tell him to update his document himself.

Which makes sense, but at the same time as an IT professional, this is not what was asked of me.  Does any wiki really have a "Submit for review" and a "Approve changes" (via email) button for document changes?

Also brings up another question of why spammers and graffiti comes up in wiki's. WikiPedia uses media wiki, how do they control... lets say ME from going into a bunch of pages and deleting everything or giving false information?  I don't get how wikipedia a public wiki using media wiki (which states that they do not believe in locking down a wiki because it defies the whole point of a wiki) can have such accurate data and I dont think I have ever seen spam on a wikipedia.

Hrm.

Thanks for any advice or help on this one guys...

Sounds about right, RSS feeds, Im hoping that Media Wiki got a RSS feed ability, seems to be the most documented out there.

I wasn't aware that restricting users from viewing/editing certain documents were native to wiki's, I'll have to read up on MediaWiki (from what i read that media wiki is more open and other wikis were better for limiting access to other wiki's) I read that doku wiki can handle this better, but when I loaded it up certain things just weren't as intitive as I had hoped for. 

RSS feeds sound like the proven way things have gone, I'll continue to travel this path, and I appriciat any comments, if any other onlooker sees my troubles here, any help is appriciated.

I like dekiwiki, but on the image i got a lot of things weren't working properly, and i dind't know how to recode in that language to even troubleshoot, perhaps ill look back into it.

does anybody here have any experience with DokuWiki? how robust is the accessibilty control in this software?