Any recommendations for making a free or low-cost wiki for personal projects? (NOT Fandom though)

You could try out mediawiki (that's the software Wikipedia is running on) on a local docket container on your machine to see if it actually is what you want or if you would prefer a simpler wiki software. Depending on how often you need it, you could self host on a raspberry pi in your home and make it accessible to your group through dyndns.

Ideally I’d like to create a simple wiki for creative projects [...] and give others editing access [...] I’m moderately tech savvy

Codeberg allows to create wikis, even if this isn't their main feature.

The best thing: It is Git-based. So you have a regular Git repository for your wiki and you don't need to learn a new workflow. You can also edit pages in the browser. Permissions are a no-brainer of course. For editing pages, Markdown is used, so you don't even need to learn a new markup language.

Since Codeberg is an open source platform run by a non-profit association all and everything is free to use.

And if you ever want to migrate to somewhere else, just git pull your wiki and you're good to go.

Using a GitHub repository wiki is a low effort / zero cost option. https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-project-with-wikis (Clearly not as charming as something self hosted though)

I mean Dokuwiki is an awesome wiki that doesnt need a database so backing up, sharing and file management is about as easy as it can be to DIY unless you just want to just sync logseq folders directly between computers.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

I don't understand why other much more unnecessarily complicted wiki softwares get recommended over dokuwiki, especially since there are some really nice plugins like the "farmer" plugin which allows you to make as many seperate subwikis each with potentially different associated accounts on a single dokuwiki.

https://www.dokuwiki.org/plugin:farmer?s[]=farmer

even cheaper obsidian.md and a Dropbox account shared folder the files just sync the changes and built in version control

Have you considered tiddlywiki? You can selfhost, or use one of a couple of services. I know of https://tiddlyhost.com/

Also you could consider anytype. It's cool, and I like what they're going for. I don't like their weird pretending to be open source license, but it's still pretty cool software. https://anytype.io

Edit: for my personal stuff, I use a combination of logseq, and tiddlywiki, the latter moreso for game development. I landed on anytype at work because it's simple, and my boss, nor anyone else cares about a license, and it just works.

For cool features: xWiki

For conveniance in setting up: if you got a synology, use the synology notes app.

I’ve been thinking about this as well for TTRPG notes and info for myself and others. I have a few raspberry pi laying around and it should be pretty easy to get something like Mediawiki (the same thing Wikipedia uses)some other wiki engine running on one.

https://hubzilla.org is a a powerful fediverse platform that includes wiki functionality

https://js.wiki is a great wiki software

if you write you content in obsidian, you can use their Publish service to host it hassle-free. also, if you don't want to pay for Obsidian Publish, it's pretty easy to set up a vitepress site on top of an obsidian vault. it's what i did here: https://kraxen72.github.io/tech-support-wiki/ https://github.com/KraXen72/tech-support-wiki (see the docs folder)

Noob question. Isn't a wiki text, images and hiperlinks? Why not just use html for it?

I think this somewhat depends on how tech savvy the people you want to give editing access are. If they know how to handle git and write markdown, I'd go with a git repository with (for example) mkdocs and setup CI/CD to automatically deploy to Github Pages. This would be free. If they are more like the typical MS Word andy, I'd go with a self hosted instance of bookstack. You could host it for example on fly. Unfortunately bookstack does not (yet) support sqlite so you'll also need mariadb, which will make hosting it on fly slightly more expensive (but probably still far below $10), because you'll need 2 machines in total. One of which you can't scale to zero. There are probably other cloud providers where its going to be cheaper though.

If it were me I would put it on my Synology. If you have any need for a Synology then the up front cost would be more but it would pay for itself in 1-2 years.

you could literally host such a website on a phone

i use obsidian notes and keep the files in a Dropbox folder that automatically syncs between my several devices. I use github pages to make it publicly visible. Since it's on github, I've got all the benefits of version control and edit tracking. Also, other authors can use whatever markdown editor they want so long as they don't break link formatting.