MediaWiki is a free software wiki package originally written for Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia project. It is now used by several other projects of the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation and by many other wikis. It is designed to handle a large number of users and pages without imposing too rigid a structure or workflow.
The software is designed to be run on a large server farm for a website that gets millions of hits per day.
MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database.
MediaWiki is usable on both large and small sites, though some aspects of configuration may seem overcomplicated partly as the software is focused on being the editing tool for Wikipedia.
Key Features
- Rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality:
- Skins.
- User styles.
-
- ‘Free links’.
- Supports rich content generated through specialized syntax.
- Namespaces.
- Customization.
- Extensions.
- Access and groups.
- File upload.
- Automatic resizing of images.
- Performance and scalability:
- Squid caches.
- Load-balanced database replication.
- Client-side caching.
- memcached or table-based caching.
- Simple static file cache.
- Feature-reduced operation.
- Revision compression.
- Job queue for database operations.
- Full text search.
- Talk pages.
- Message notification.
- Automatic signatures.
- Multi-language support with UTF-8 support.
Website: www.mediawiki.org
Support: Documentation
Developer: Wikimedia Foundation
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
MediaWiki is written in PHP. Learn PHP with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Wiki Engines | |
|---|---|
| Wiki.js | Wiki engine running on Node.js and written in JavaScript |
| MediaWiki | Collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia |
| XWiki | Enterprise wiki written in Java |
| TiddlyWiki | Personal wiki and non-linear notebook |
| DokuWiki | Targeted at developer teams, workgroups and small companies |
| Docmost | Collaborative wiki and documentation software |
| Tiki Wiki | Wiki-based content management system |
| BookStack | Platform to create documentation/wiki content |
| Gollum | Simple wiki system built on top of Git |
| PmWiki | Offers a simple-to-install system |
| JSPWiki | Built around the standard J2EE components of Java, servlets and JSP |
| Foswiki | Supports the embedding of active and passive macros |
| WackoWiki | Small, lightweight, handy, expandable, multilingual written in PHP |
| PhpWiki | Wiki engine written in PHP |
| MoinMoin | Advanced, easy to use and extensible wiki engine implemented in Python |
| TWiki | Easy to use enterprise wiki and collaboration platform |
| Otter Wiki | Python-based wiki for collaborative content management |
| Wiki-Go | Flat-file wiki platform |
| LeafWiki | Lightweight self-hosted wiki |
| WikkaWiki | Flexible, lightweight, standards-compliant wiki engine |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Discovered a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |

