What is Mediawiki

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. 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. Notably, Novell uses it to operate several of its high-traffic websites.

MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language, and can use either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. MediaWiki is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version while its documentation is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license and partly in the public domain, making it free and open source software.

Histroy:

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. Wikipedia had originally used a small wiki engine called UseModWiki written in Perl. 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. Later, Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, took up the role of release manager and most active developer. 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", and the name was gradually phased in beginning in August 2003. The name has frequently caused confusion due to its intentional similarity to the "Wikimedia" name (which itself is similar to "Wikipedia"). 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 mid-2003. 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. The double square brackets around the photo of a sunflower symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages.