I have two decisions... I am currently making my own Wiki-based site, however because I don't wish to use MediaWiki (what WikiPedia uses) or any other software like that, I am making my own... however I want to know as this will soon start having thousands of articles on it which one of the following options would be better for retrieving the information?? (To save on server load) 1) MySQL Database or 2) Text Files (using fopen(), etc..) ??
You definitely want to go with sql if you having thousands of articles. I mean how would you incorporate a search function with files? Open them one by one and search for the text? That would take a nice long time, and substantially add to the server load. That and you'll want to have user data so they can login and create their own articles, right? Just my opinion but I think sql would be best.
SQL hands down. Doing that with that many text files will become incredibly slow and resource intensive. And like Todd said, implementing features like searching would become so much more complicated. If you're worried about taking the time to learn SQL, don't be. PHP interacts really well with MySQL, and it doesn't take much to learn at all.
Definitely SQL mate. If you use text files you'll have loading issues. It's much easier to query a database, pull the content and render it.