MediaWiki

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The MediaWiki logo. The brackets around the sunflower symbolise the way internal links are created when editing pages.

MediaWiki is the name of the software that runs all of the Wikimedia projects. MediaWiki was released in 2003. The software is licensed under the GPL. This means it is free content, or open source.

MediaWiki is free server-based software which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It's designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day. MediaWiki is an very powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that 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.


Information and discussion about this software can be found on the following pages: