June 18th, 2020
We all know what Wikipedia is, right? It's a free encyclopedia online. Well, MediaWiki (MW) is similar. MW was developed in 2002 for use on Wikipedia but changed its name in 2003. It is still in use with Wikipedia today.
MW is server-based software designed to run on a large server farm for a website, or more particular, for your website. It is a collaboration and documentation platform that has a vibrant community. MW is a powerful, scalable, and feature-rich. It uses PHP to process and display data within a database. MW uses wikitext format so that users without knowledge of HTML or CSS can edit them easily.
MW's interface is available in more than 300 different languages. It has more than one thousand configuration settings and more than 1800 extensions to enable various features that can be added and changed.
It all sounds expensive, right? Well, guess what? MW is FREE!
Here are a few things to consider before you decide to jump right in and set it up:
- MW was designed for open content, and it is often not suitable for situations where you want to restrict access to part of the wiki. So if you need to limit it, an example would be to host a wiki on an organization's internal network, where only insiders see it.
- MW has been designed to serve very high-traffic websites such as Wikipedia. It has been optimized for this use and may not be suitable for smaller sites, where disk space or memory is restricted. In other words, you will want to host MW on a dedicated server.
- If you are looking for forum/blogging software, MW is not a suitable replacement.
If you require the above stated in your wiki, then there may be other wiki software (or non-wiki software) that will be better suited to your needs.
Conclusion
If you are looking to set up a wiki for your organization or for a public wiki that you know will grow very large, then MediaWiki should be your number one choice of wiki software.
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