The current software used by Wikipedia and other projects being run under the Wikimedia Foundation, as well as many other sites. It was originally just called the 'Phase III' software, being the third wikiwikiweb engine written for Wikipedia.

MediaWiki is an open source wikiwikiweb engine licensed under the GPL. It was initially written by Lee Daniel Crocker, and the current head developer is Brion Vibber. The current version as of 2005-04-06 is MediaWiki is 1.4.0.

Features

  • Multiple skins
  • Dead links displayed a different colour than live links (the thing I miss most when on E2)
  • Stub threshhold to display short articles yet another colour
  • Auto-generated table of contents
  • ISBN numbers become links to a list of booksellers
  • File uploads (images, video, sound, &c.)
  • Math formulae displayed as HTML and/or PNG using LaTeX.
  • Auto-resizing of images
  • Personal watchlist so you can see revisions to the particular articles you're interested in.
  • User contributions, to see what edits a user has made.
  • Recent changes in normal and extended views.
  • Diffs for comparing two versions of an article side-by-side.
  • UseMod-like syntax
  • Namespaces for aticles, talk pages, user pages, messages, user talk, Wikipedia (or whatever your site is, for stuff like Everything University), &c.
  • Word-extension linking (bastards => bastards automatically (note the pipe link))
  • Parenthetical hiding so 'Data (Star Trek)' will display as 'Data'.
  • Section editing (and linking) so long articles can be edited one section at a time (separated by header tags).
  • Editing toolbars, if you use a browser on which they work.
  • Doubleclick to edit this page.
  • Preview feature. (I'd love to proof-read this writeup before it shows up on ENN.)
  • Edit conflict managing.
  • Message notification for when someone edits your talk page.
  • Multilingual support: it's been translated into multiple languages.
  • Interwiki links (Read this article in: Dansk | Deutsch | Esperanto ...)
  • Multiple permission levels (unregistered users, normal users, sysops, bureaucrats, developers)
  • Squid-based caching
  • Move page function
  • Ability for sysops to protect pages so they cannot be edited by normal users.
  • Delete and undelete pages.
  • Can users by ip or by username.
  • Allow sysops to run SQL queries.
  • Full-text search
  • Special stats pages for: longest articles, shortest articles, most linked-to articles, most linked-to non-existent article, most visited articles, unlinked-to articles, old articles, new articles, &c.
  • Random article.

MediaWiki currently only supports mySQL.

Resources

  • http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki
  • http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/
  • http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki
  • Mailing List: http://mail.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/-/date.html
  • irc://irc.freenode.net/mediawiki

This writeup is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.