MediaWiki is a free, open-source software platform primarily used to run wikis, including Wikipedia, the world’s largest and most popular online encyclopedia. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, MediaWiki is designed to be highly extensible, efficient, and capable of managing large-scale collaborative content creation.
Key Features:
- Content Management: MediaWiki allows users to create, edit, and organize content collaboratively. It supports text formatting, multimedia, and linking between articles.
- Version Control: Every edit made on a MediaWiki-powered wiki is tracked, allowing users to view the history of changes and restore previous versions.
- WYSIWYG Editing: While it’s traditionally based on a markup language called wikitext, MediaWiki also supports a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) editor for easier content creation.
- User Permissions: It offers granular control over user permissions, from editing privileges to administrative control, making it suitable for both open collaboration and private, controlled environments.
- Extensibility: MediaWiki supports a wide range of extensions, which can add features like social networking tools, data visualization, and advanced content management functions.
- Multilingual Support: MediaWiki allows for the creation of wikis in multiple languages, making it a global tool for content collaboration.
- Search and Navigation: It has a powerful search function to help users quickly find articles, and it supports linking between pages and creating categories to organize content.
Use Cases:
- Wikipedia: MediaWiki’s most well-known use case, running Wikipedia’s vast repository of articles.
- Other Wikis: It is used by numerous other websites and organizations to create collaborative knowledge bases, documentation, or communities.
- Private and Enterprise Wikis: Many organizations use MediaWiki internally for knowledge management, training, and documentation.
MediaWiki is popular due to its robustness, flexibility, and scalability, and it is widely adopted for running collaborative websites and databases that require high performance and efficient content management.
