MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. It is developed by, and it runs, all the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Wikinews, as well as powering many other wiki websites worldwide. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database.^[1]

The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia in 2002. It has been deployed since then by many companies as a content management system for internal knowledge management. Notably, 'Novell' uses it to operate several of its high-traffic websites. Thousands of websites use MediaWiki. Some educators have also assigned students to use MediaWiki for collaborative group projects.^[1]

The software is optimized for efficient handling of projects of all sizes, including the largest wikis 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 also been a major concern for developers. Wikipedia and other 'Wikimedia' projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.^[1]

The software is highly customizable, with more than 700 configuration settings and more than 1,600 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. More than 600 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing MediaWiki sites.^[1]