MediaWiki

Not to be confused with Wikimedia.

MediaWiki
Original author(s)
Developer(s)Wikimedia Foundation
Initial releaseJanuary 25, 2002; 22 years ago (2002-01-25)
Stable release
1.42.3[1] Edit this on Wikidata / 1 October 2024; 57 days ago (1 October 2024)
Repository
Written inPHP[2]
Operating systemWindows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris
Size79.05 MiB (compressed)
Available in459[3] languages
TypeWiki software
LicenseGPLv2+[4]
Websitemediawiki.org Edit this at Wikidata

MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker,[5][6] after which development has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software.[7] Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.

MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second.[7][8] Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages.[9] The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings[10] and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed.[11]

  1. ^ "Maintenance release: MediaWiki 1.39.10, 1.41.4 and 1.42.3". Retrieved October 1, 2024.
  2. ^ Reed, Sam (December 19, 2019). "Announcing MediaWiki 1.34.0". mediawiki-announce (Mailing list). Archived from the original on December 19, 2019. Retrieved December 19, 2019.
  3. ^ "Names.php  • mediawiki". github.com. April 8, 2021. Archived from the original on July 15, 2021. Retrieved May 19, 2021.
  4. ^ "Copyright". mediawiki.org. Archived from the original on September 19, 2015. Retrieved September 7, 2015.
  5. ^ Magnus Manske's announcement of "PHP Wikipedia", wikipedia-l, August 24, 2001
  6. ^ Barrett, Daniel J. (October 2008). MediaWiki. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-0-596-51979-7. Retrieved April 23, 2010.
  7. ^ a b "What is MediaWiki?". MediaWiki. January 9, 2021. Archived from the original on July 22, 2018. Retrieved March 27, 2021.
  8. ^ Česky. "Wikipedia:Statistics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia". Wikipedia. Archived from the original on August 28, 2021. Retrieved May 30, 2010.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference translation statistics was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ "Category:MediaWiki configuration settings". MediaWiki. September 11, 2016. Archived from the original on November 10, 2014. Retrieved September 11, 2016.
  11. ^ "Extension Matrix". MediaWiki. Archived from the original on September 11, 2016. Retrieved September 6, 2017.