Overview

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software package written in PHP. Originally developed by Magnus Manske and released for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, it has been further enhanced and coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. The name "MediaWiki" was officially adopted in 2003 as wordplay on the Wikimedia Foundation's identity.

Purpose and Use

MediaWiki serves as the collaborative editing software powering Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects, enabling hundreds of millions of people to access and contribute to knowledge each month. Beyond Wikipedia, it is widely adopted by organizations ranging from SFMOMA to NASA, allowing teams to maintain documentation in one extensible and adaptable platform. The software is the foundation for knowledge commons infrastructure, facilitating collaborative knowledge creation across diverse domains.

Key Features

• Large-Scale Performance: Optimized to efficiently handle massive projects with terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second
• Multilingual Support: Interface available in more than 400 languages, enabling global accessibility
• Extensible Architecture: Hundreds of configuration settings and over 1,000 extensions available for customizing functionality
• Collaborative Editing: Enables multiple users to contribute to and maintain shared knowledge bases
• Version Control: Built-in revision history and tracking of changes made by contributors
• Open Source: Free to download, modify, and redistribute under open-source licenses

Technical Details

• Language: Written in PHP
• Repository: Available on GitHub at wikimedia/mediawiki with mirror from gerrit.wikimedia.org
• Deployment: Docker images available for easy deployment and testing
• Extensions: Semantic MediaWiki and numerous other extensions expand functionality

Use Cases

• Corporate knowledge bases and internal documentation systems
• Educational platforms for collaborative learning
• Community-driven knowledge projects