MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki application.

Description

It was developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and runs on many websites, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikimedia Commons.

PHP and MySQL

It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a MySQL database.

Features

The software has more than 800 configuration settings and more than 2,000 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed.

On Wikipedia alone, more than 1000 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing.

wikitext

See:

• Help:HTML in wikitext @ Wikipedia
• Help:Formatting

History

The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of the Wikipedia encyclopedia in 2002.

Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.

The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second.

Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers.

Other uses

It has also been deployed by some companies as an internal knowledge management system, and some educators have assigned students to use MediaWiki for collaborative group projects.

See also

• Database
• Information system
• Information technology
• MediaWiki naming conventions
• MySQL
• PHP
• Scalability
• Wiki
• Wikipedia

External links

• MediaWiki Home Page
• MediaWiki @ Wikipedia