MediaWiki

MediaWiki

Screenshot The Main Page of the Simple English Wikipedia which runs on MediaWiki
Developer(s)	Wikimedia Foundation, Tim Starling (release manager)
Initial release	25 January 2002
Stable release	1.27.1 / August 22, 2016; 8 years ago (2016-08-22)[1]
Repository	gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/
Operating system	Cross-platform
Available in	More than 350 languages
Type	Wiki
License	GPLv2+
Website	mediawiki.org

MediaWiki is the name of the software that runs all of the Wikimedia projects and many more. MediaWiki was released in 2003. It is a free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). This means it is free content, or open source.

MediaWiki is designed to be run on a large web server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is a very powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation. It uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database. Pages use MediaWiki's Wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit them easily.

When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

All Wikimedia projects run on MediaWiki version 1.44.0-wmf.3 (b4aac1f).^[2]

1. ↑ "[MediaWiki-announce] Security Release - 1.27.1, 1.26.4, 1.23.15". MediaWiki-announce mailing list. Wikimedia Foundation. Retrieved 16 September 2016.
2. ↑ Meta wiki's version page