For the Mediawiki namespace on Wikipedia see- Wikipedia:MediaWiki namespace.

MediaWiki
Screenshot The Main Page of the English Wikipedia.
Developed by	Wikimedia Foundation, Brion Vibber (release manager)
Initial release	25 January 2002
Stable release	1.12  (March 20, 2008 (2008-03-20); 85 days ago) [+/−]
Preview release	SVN  (1. A software developer is a person or organization concerned with facets of the software development process wider than design and coding a somewhat broader scope of The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Events 41 - After a night of negotiation Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate See also 2002 (disambiguation Year 2002 ( MMII) was a Common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. A software release is the distribution whether public or private of an initial or new and upgraded version of a Computer software product Events 1600 - The Linköping Bloodbath takes place on Maundy Thursday in Linköping, Sweden. 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common A software release is the distribution whether public or private of an initial or new and upgraded version of a Computer software product 13alpha) [+/−]
Written in	PHP
OS	Cross-platform
Available in	over 100 languages
Genre	Wiki
License	GNU General Public License
Website	mediawiki.org (English)

MediaWiki is a web-based wiki software application used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, including some of the largest and most popular ones. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination In computing cross-platform (also known as multi-platform) is a term used to refer to Computer software or computing methods and concepts that are implemented A language is a dynamic set of visual auditory or tactile Symbols of Communication and the elements used to manipulate them Computer software can be organized into categories based on common function type or field of use A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content using a simplified Markup language. A software license (or software licence in commonwealth usage is a Legal instrument governing the usage or redistribution of copyright protected software A website (alternatively web site or Web site, a back-construction from the Proper noun World Wide Web) is a collection of Web pages The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. Wiki software is a type of Collaborative software that runs a Wiki system The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Wikia (originally Wikicities) is a selective Free web hosting service for Wikis (or Wiki farm) operated by Wikia Inc ^[1] Originally developed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia, today it has also been deployed by companies for internal knowledge management, and as a content management system. _____ __ / ___/ / /_ ____ ____ \__ \ / __/ / __ \ / __ \ ___/ / / /_ ***************************************************************************************** * * Knowledge Management (KM A content management system ( CMS) is a computer application used to create edit manage and publish content in a consistently organized fashion Notably, Novell uses it to operate several of its high traffic websites. Novell Inc ( is a global Software Corporation based in the United States specializing in enterprise operating systems such as SUSE ^[2]

MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language, and can use either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability MySQL is a Relational database management system (RDBMS which has more than 11 million installations PostgreSQL is an Object-relational database management system (ORDBMS A Relational database management system (RDBMS is a Database management system (DBMS that is based on the Relational model as introduced by E MediaWiki is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License while its documentation is released under the GFDL and partly in the public domain, making it free and open source software. The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software The public domain is a range of abstract materials &ndash commonly referred to as Intellectual property &ndash which are not owned or controlled by anyone Free software or software libre is Software that can be used studied and modified without restriction and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified

History

The current software was originally written for Wikipedia by Lee Daniel Crocker, based on the user interface design of Magnus Manske, a developer and student of the University of Cologne. ***************************************************************************************** * * The University of Cologne ( German Universität zu Köln) is one of the oldest universities in Europe and with over 44000 students one Wikipedia had originally used a small wiki engine called UseModWiki written in Perl. UseModWiki is a wiki engine in the Perl programming language It is licensed under the GNU General Public License. NOTES FOR EDITORS "Perl" is not an acronym (read the "Name" section below Wikipedia was later switched to Manske's PHP-based software to offer more functionality. Increasing usage caused load problems, leading Crocker to re-write the software with a more scalable MySQL database backend. MySQL is a Relational database management system (RDBMS which has more than 11 million installations Later, Brion Vibber would take up the role of release manager and most active developer. ^[3]

Since the release of the first version of Manske's script, the software had been given multiple nicknames representing the state of development—"the PHP script", "phase II", "phase III", "the new codebase"—but no product name. After the Wikimedia Foundation was announced on June 20, 2003, the name "MediaWiki" was coined by Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer as a play on "Wikimedia," ^[4] and the name was gradually phased in beginning in August 2003. The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Events 451 - Battle of Chalons: Flavius Aetius ' defeats Attila the Hun. Year 2003 ( MMIII) was a Common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. The name has frequently caused confusion due to its intentional similarity to the "Wikimedia" name (which itself is similar to "Wikipedia"). Nevertheless, "MediaWiki" has become a recognizable brand, with a Google search yielding over 67 million results on the name in March 2008. Google Inc is an American public corporation, earning revenue from advertising related to its Internet search, e-mail, online 2008 ( MMVIII) is the current year in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, a Leap year that started on Tuesday of the Common

The product logo was created by Erik Moeller using a flower photograph taken by Florence Nibart-Devouard, and was originally submitted to an international logo contest for a new Wikipedia logo held in summer 2003. Florence Jacqueline Sylvie Devouard née Nibart (born September 10, 1968) was the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation ^[5] The logo came in third place, and was chosen to represent MediaWiki instead of Wikipedia, with the second place logo used for the Wikimedia Foundation and the first place logo for Wikipedia itself. The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, ^[6] The double square brackets around the photo of a sunflower symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages. The sunflower ( Helianthus annuus) is an Annual plant in the family Asteraceae and native to the Americas, with a large flowering In Computer science, the syntax of a Programming language is the set of rules that a sequence of characters in a Source code file must follow to be considered as a In computing a hyperlink is a Reference or Navigation element in a Document to another Section of the same document or to another

Release history

This table contains the release history of MediaWiki. The newest version of the software runs at the Test Wikipedia, hosted at http://test.wikipedia.org/ and presently running on version 1. 13alpha. ^[7]

Key features

Editing interface of MediaWiki 1. 7, showing the edit toolbar and some examples of wiki syntax.

MediaWiki provides a rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality.

Due to the strong emphasis on multilinguality in the Wikimedia projects, internationalization and localization has received significant attention by developers. In Computing, Internationalization and localization (also spelled internationalisation and localisation, see spelling differences) are means of adapting The user interface has been fully or partially translated into more than 100 languages (see also translation statistics and Multilingual MediaWiki), and can be further customized by site administrators (the entire interface is editable through the wiki).

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. In Computer science, a cache (kæʃ like "cash") is a collection of data duplicating original Replication is the process of sharing information so as to ensure consistency between redundant resources such as Software or Hardware components to improve reliability Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.

One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki (and its predecessor, UseModWiki) and other wiki engines was the use of "free links" instead of CamelCase. Wikitext language or wiki markup is a Markup language that offers a simplified alternative to HTML and is used to write pages in CamelCase (also spelled " camel case " and sometimes known as medial capitals) is the practice of writing compound words or phrases in which the Where, in a typical wiki, text like "WorldWideWeb" would have to be typed to create a link to a page about the World Wide Web, links in MediaWiki are created by surrounding words with double square brackets, and any spaces between them are left intact, e. The World Wide Web (commonly shortened to the Web) is a system of interlinked Hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. g. [[World Wide Web]]. This change was logical for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia, where accuracy in titles is very important.

To make editing long pages such as comprehensive Wikipedia articles easier, MediaWiki allows the editing of a subsection of a page (as identified by its header).

Rich content

Images can be arranged in galleries, a feature that is used extensively for Wikimedia's media archive, Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a repository of Free content images sound and other multimedia files

MediaWiki supports rich content generated through specialized syntax. For example, the software comes with support for rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX and a special parser written in OCaml. LaTeX (ˈleɪtɛ Objective Caml ( OCaml) is the main implementation of the Caml Programming language, created by Xavier Leroy, Jérôme Vouillon Similar functionality for other content, ranging from graphical timelines over mathematical plotting and musical scores to Egyptian hieroglyphs, is available in the form of extensions and also aesthetic sense has improved considerably. Sheet music is a hand-written or printed form of Musical notation; like its analogs -- books pamphlets etc Egyptian hieroglyphs (ˈhaɪərəʊɡlɪf from Greek grc-Grek ἱερογλύφος " sacred carving " also hieroglyphic = grc-Grek

As the name MediaWiki suggests, the software has become ever more powerful at dealing with a wide variety of uploaded media files. Its richest functionality is in the area of images, where image galleries and thumbnails can be generated with relative ease if the software is set up correctly. There is also support for Exif metadata. Exchangeable image file format ( Exif) is a specification for the Image File format used by Digital cameras The specification uses the existing Metadata ( meta data, or sometimes metainformation) is "data about data" of any sort in any media The use of MediaWiki to operate the Wikimedia Commons, one of the largest free content media archives, has driven the need for further functionality in this area. Wikimedia Commons (or simply Commons) is a repository of Free content images sound and other multimedia files _____ __ / ___/ / /_ ____ ____ \__ \ / __/ / __ \ / __ \ ___/ / / /_

MediaWiki currently provides no native WYSIWYG support, though it does come with a graphical toolbar for simplifying the process of learning the wiki syntax. WYSIWYG (ˈwɪziwɪg or /ˈwɪzɪwɪg/ is an Acronym for W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G It also has a simple interface to allow the transparent use of external editors for uploaded files and wiki pages.

Organization

MediaWiki provides many features beyond hyperlinks for structuring content. One of the earliest features is namespaces. In general a namespace is an abstract container providing context for the items ( Names or Technical terms or Words it holds and allowing disambiguation One problem for Wikipedia had long been the separation of encyclopedic content from discussions surrounding it, as well as personal pages about encyclopedia editors. Namespaces are prefixes before a page title (like "User:" or "Talk:") which allow a page to exist under multiple names, but serving different purposes depending on their prefix. For instance, a page "[[The Terminator]]" could describe the 1984 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, while a page "[[User:The Terminator]]" could be a profile describing a user who chooses this name as a pseudonym. The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction / Action film directed and co-written by James Cameron. Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger ( German ˌaɐnɔlt aloʏs ˈʃvaɐtsənɛɡɐ born July 30 1947 is an Austrian American Bodybuilder, Actor More commonly, each page has an associated "Talk:" page which can be used to discuss its contents.

Namespaces can be viewed as folders which separate different basic types of information or functionality. A file folder (US usage or folder (British and Australian usage is a kind of Folder that holds loose Papers together for organization and protection While new namespaces can be added, the number of namespaces in a wiki is typically relatively low.

In addition to namespaces, pages can be structured using subpages. This simple feature provides automatic backlinks from a page of the pattern [[Page title/Subpage title]] to the component before the slash (in this case, "Page title"). Backlinks (or back-links (UK are incoming links to a Website or Web page.

MediaWiki supports user-created categories. These are similar to tags used in many web applications, but hierarchical and descriptive. A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a piece of information (such as an Internet bookmark, digital image or Computer file) In large wikis like Wikipedia, very complex hierarchies have grown using this system without any central planning. ***************************************************************************************** * * ^[8]

Customization

Users can configure custom JavaScript that is executed on every pageview. This has led to JavaScript tools that users can "install", the "navigation popup" tool shown here displays a small preview of an article when hovering over a link title.

If the feature is enabled, users can customize their stylesheets and configure client-side JavaScript to be executed with every pageview. JavaScript is a Scripting language most often used for Client-side web development On Wikipedia, this has led to a large number of additional tools and helpers developed through the wiki and shared among users. For instance, Lupin's navigation popups is a custom JavaScript tool that shows previews of articles when the user hovers over links, and also provides shortcuts for common maintenance tasks. ^[9] Another example is wikEd, a full-featured MediaWiki-integrated text editor that provides syntax highlighting and search and replace functions. ^[10]

The entire MediaWiki user interface can be edited through the wiki itself by users with the necessary permissions (typically so-called "administrators"). This is done through a special namespace with the prefix "MediaWiki:", where each page title identifies a particular user interface message. The "MediaWiki:" namespace was also originally used for creating custom text blocks that could then be dynamically loaded into other pages using a special syntax. This content was later moved into its own namespace, "Template:".

Templates are text blocks which can be dynamically loaded inside another page whenever that page is requested. The template "tag" is simply a special link in double curly brackets (for example "{{disputed}}") which calls the template (in this case located at Template:Disputed) to load where the tag is. Brackets are Punctuation marks used in pairs to set apart or interject text within other text Templates support parameters, so that parts of the text can be substituted for each specific use case. In Mathematics, Statistics, and the mathematical Sciences a parameter ( G auxiliary measure) is a quantity that defines certain characteristics A related method, called template substitution (called by adding subst: at the beginning of a template tag) inserts (like a copy and paste operation) the contents of the template into the target page, instead of loading the template contents dynamically whenever the page is loaded. For a pejorative meaning see Cut and paste job In Human-computer interaction, cut and paste and copy and paste offer This limits the consistency of using templates, but may be useful in certain cases, and is (perhaps) less demanding on the server. A server is a Computer dedicated to providing one or more services over a computer network typically through a request-response routine

Templates have found many different uses, such as:

• Identifying problems with a Wikipedia article by putting a template in the article. This template will then output a graphical box stating that the article is disputed, and also categorize it so that articles of this nature can be located.
• Creating complex table layouts which are used consistently across multiple pages, and where only the content of the tables gets inserted using template parameters.
• Sending users standard messages when they are blocked from editing, when their behavior is considered inappropriate, and so on.

The Semantic MediaWiki extension

MediaWiki has the user interface in different languages. Semantic MediaWiki (SMW is an extension to MediaWiki (the Wiki software implementation that Wikipedia and other sites run that allows for the encoding A language for the wiki content itself can also be set, to be sent in the "Content-Language" HTTP header and "lang" HTML attribute.

The MediaWiki codebase contains various "hooks" using callback functions to add additional code in an extensible way. In Computer programming, a callback is Executable code that is passed as an argument to other code In Computer science, a subroutine ( function, method, procedure, or subprogram) is a portion of code within a larger In Software engineering, extensibility (sometimes confused with Forward compatibility) is a System design principle where the implementation takes into This allows developers to write extensions without modifying the core or having to submit their code for review. Installing an extension typically consists of adding a line to the configuration file, though in some cases additional changes such as database updates are required.

Extensions

MediaWiki is getting more and more advanced and useful for other targets through its extensions. Many of the available extensions are simple scripts to allow embedding content such as Adobe Flash files or HTML forms. Adobe Flash (previously called Shockwave Flash and Macromedia Flash) is a set of Multimedia software created by Macromedia and currently Others add complex new behavior to the wiki syntax, such as Semantic MediaWiki which provides the ability to add structured and searchable relations and attributes to wiki pages (cf. Semantic MediaWiki (SMW is an extension to MediaWiki (the Wiki software implementation that Wikipedia and other sites run that allows for the encoding semantic web). The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which the Semantics of information and services on the web is defined making it possible for the Examples of extensions that could improve a wiki are:

• Ratings extension
• Category suggestion extension
• RSS feed inclusion
• Flash inclusion
• YouTube inclusion

The Wikimedia Foundation operates a Subversion server where many extensions are hosted, and a directory of them can be found on the MediaWiki website. Subversion ( SVN) is a version control system initiated in 2000 by CollabNet Inc Some other sites also are known for development of - or support for extensions

• http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Contents
• http://www.leerwiki.nl/Categorie:MediaWiki
• http://www.mwusers.com
• http://mediawiki.googlecode.com/

Access and groups

While MediaWiki comes with a basic set of features related to restricting access and defining user groups, page access control does not tend to be given high priority in development. For instance, it is not possible to define the access permissions to pages on a per-namespace basis. Here, wiki engines like TWiki, MoinMoin and WikkaWiki provide more flexibility by supporting advanced security mechanisms like Access Control Lists. Twiki is a Fictional character on the TV show Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. MoinMoin is a wiki engine implemented in Python, initially based on the PikiPiki wiki engine For the neopagan religion and religious movement see Wicca. WikkaWiki (often shortened as Wikka) is a free, lightweight In Computer security, an access control list ( ACL) is a list of permissions attached to an object

Performance

Because it is used to run one of the highest traffic sites on the World Wide Web, Wikipedia, MediaWiki performance and scalability have been highly optimized. ***************************************************************************************** * * In Telecommunications and Software engineering, scalability is a desirable property of a system a network or a process which indicates its ability to either MediaWiki supports Squid caches, load balanced database replication, client-side caching, memcached or table-based caching for frequently accessed processing of query results, a simple static file cache, feature-reduced operation, revision compression, and a job queue for database operations. Squid is a Proxy server and Web cache daemon. It has a wide variety of uses from speeding up a Web server by caching repeated requests In Computer networking, load balancing is a technique to spread work between two or more computers network links CPUs hard drives or other resources in order to get optimal memcached (pronunciation mem-cache-dee is a general-purpose distributed memory caching system that was originally developed by Danga Interactive for LiveJournal

The software is suitable for the operation of large scale wiki farms such as Wikimedia, which has about 750 wikis as of December 2007. A wiki farm is a server or an array of servers that provides hosting for multiple Wikis Wiki farms are also known as "hosted wiki service December 2007 is the twelfth month of that year It began on a Saturday and 31 days later ended on a Monday However, MediaWiki comes with no built-in functionality to manage such installations.

Limitations

Aside from the aforementioned lack of WYSIWYG features, user documentation is found online only (there is no printed manual). WYSIWYG (ˈwɪziwɪg or /ˈwɪzɪwɪg/ is an Acronym for W hat Y ou S ee I s W hat Y ou G The installation and usage of the MediaWiki software is not intuitive for inexperienced computer users.

The parser serves as the de facto standard for the MediaWiki syntax as no formal syntax has been defined. Since the syntax has no formal definition (e. g. , in Extended Backus–Naur form (EBNF)) there is an inherent difficulty in creating a WYSIWYG editor or complete porting of the syntax to another language. In Computer science, Extended Backus–Naur Form (EBNF is a Metasyntax notation used to express Context-free grammars that is a formal way to describe Work is in progress to formalise the grammar in ANTLR. In computer based language recognition ANother Tool for Language Recognition ( ANTLR) is the name of a Parser generator that uses LL(* parsing ^{[11] [12]}

Furthermore, there is no offline version of MediaWiki, which would enable users to update pages on their client offline, and then have those pages automatically transferred to the server when re-connected, in a similar way to the client-server operation of Lotus Notes. Lotus Notes is a Client-server, collaborative application developed and sold by IBM Software Group An offline MediaWiki client could also help users with the back-up of important pages.

See also

• Multilingual MediaWiki
• Comparison of wiki software
• List of content management systems
• List of wiki software

References

External links

• MediaWiki official homepage, with Hubs for users, system administrators and developers.
• MediaWiki on the Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia's meta website. The Wikimedia Foundation Inc is a Non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, Meta (from Greek: μετά = "after" "beyond" "with" "adjacent" is a prefix used in English in order to indicate a concept
• #mediawiki on freenode