The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia in 2002.1 It has been deployed since then by many companies as a content management system for internal knowledge management.2 Notably Novell uses it to operate several of its high-traffic websites.345 Thousands of websites use MediaWiki.6 Some educators have also assigned students to use MediaWiki for collaborative group projects.7

The software is optimized to efficiently handle projects of all sizes including the largest wikis which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second.8 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. Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects continue to define a large part of the requirement set for MediaWiki.

The software is highly customizable with more than 700 configuration settings9 and more than 1600 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed.10 More than 600 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing MediaWiki sites.11 Software hacks are also available although MediaWiki.org lightly discourages them and does not provide a central repository of them.12 Contents 1 License 2 Development 3 History 4 Sites using MediaWiki 5 Key features 5.1 Installation and configuration 5.2 Markup 5.3 Editing interface 5.4 Application Programming Interface 5.5 Rich content 5.6 Tracking edits 5.7 Navigation 5.8 Content organization 5.8.1 Page tabs and associated pages 5.8.2 Namespaces 5.8.3 Category Tags 5.8.4 Subpages 5.9 Customization 5.10 Templates 5.11 Groups and restriction of access 5.12 Extensibility 6 Extensions 6.1 Resources to developers 6.2 For parser functions 6.3 For footnotes and academic-related display 6.4 Integration 6.5 Combating linkspam 6.6 Searches and queries 7 Database 8 Performance and storage 9 Limitations 10 Security 11 Developer's community 12 Support 13 Comparison to other online collaboration software 14 Version history 15 See also 16 References 17 External links License

MediaWiki is free and open source software and 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.13 Specifically the manuals and other content at MediaWiki.org are Creative Commons-licensed while the set of help pages intended to be freely copied into fresh wiki installations and/or distributed with MediaWiki software is public domain. This was done to eliminate legal issues arising from the help pages being imported into wikis with licenses that are incompatible with the Creative Commons license.14 MediaWiki development has generally favored the use of open-source media formats.15 Development

MediaWiki has an active volunteer community for development and maintenance. Users who have made meaningful contributions to the project by submitting patches are generally upon request granted access to commit revisions to the project's Apache Subversion repository.16 There is also a small group of paid programmers who primarily develop projects for the Wikimedia foundation. Wikimedia participates in the Google Summer of Code by facilitating the assignment of mentors to students wishing to work on MediaWiki core and extension projects.17 As of June 2010 there were 143 developers who had committed changes to the MediaWiki core or extensions within the past year.18 Major MediaWiki releases are generated approximately every three to eight months by taking snapshots of the development trunk which is kept continuously in a runnable state;19 minor releases or point releases are issued as needed to correct bugs (especially security problems).

MediaWiki has a public bug tracker bugzilla.wikimedia.org (alternatively known as Mediazilla) which uses Bugzilla. The site is also used for feature and enhancements requests. 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. 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 Foundation20 took up the role of release manager and most active developer.121

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"22 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").23 Major milestones in MediaWiki's development have included the categorization system added in 2004; parser functions added in 2006; and flagged revisions added in 2008.24 The product logo was created by Erik Mller 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-2003.25 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.26 The double square brackets around the photo of a sunflower symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages. Sites using MediaWiki MediaWiki's most famous use has been in Wikipedia and to a lesser degree Wikimedia's other projects. But there are many other famous sites that used MediaWiki. Users who became disaffected with the stances taken by Wikipedia and its editing community have used the same software to form their own wiki encyclopedias; examples include Conservapedia27 and Metapedia.28 MediaWiki bots and other scripts used on Wikipedia can also be reused on other wikis; the common software also facilitates the import of useful initial articles and templates from Wikipedia for new wikis29 because all MediaWiki sites share the same wiki markup. The experience made available through MediaWiki was used in the development of the Generic Model Organism Database.30 MediaWiki was also used as a comprehensive system for online editing of database entries in the GermOnline cross-species systems browser.31 A prototype based on MediaWiki was also developed that allowed end-users to work with SAP ERP business objects.32 United Nations agencies such as the U.N. Development Programme and INSTRAW chose to implement their wikis using MediaWiki because "this software runs Wikipedia and is therefore guaranteed to be thoroughly tested will continue to be developed well into the future and future technicians on these wikis will be more likely to have exposure to MediaWiki than any other wiki software."33 Key features MediaWiki provides a rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality. Due to the strong emphasis on multilingualism in the Wikimedia projects internationalization and localization has received significant attention by developers. The user interface has been fully or partially translated into more than 300 languages34 and can be further customized by site administrators (the entire interface is editable through the wiki). Installation and configuration Installation of MediaWiki requires that the user have administrative privileges on a server running both PHP and a compatible type of SQL database. Some users find that setting up a virtual host is helpful if the majority of one's site runs under a framework (such as Zope or Ruby on Rails) that is largely incompatible with MediaWiki.35 Cloud hosting can enable a user to dispense with task of building a new server by hand.36 An installation PHP script is accessed via a web browser to initialize the wiki's settings. It prompts the user for a minimal set of required parameters leaving further changes such as enabling uploads37 adding a site logo38 and installing extensions to be made by modifying configuration settings39 contained in a file called LocalSettings.php.40 Some aspects of MediaWiki can be configured through special pages or by editing certain pages; for instance abuse filters can be configured through a special page41 and certain gadgets can be added by creating javascript pages in the MediaWiki namespace.42 The MediaWiki community publishes a comprehensive installation guide.43 Markup One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki (and its predecessor UseModWiki) and other wiki engines was the use of "free links" instead of CamelCase. When MediaWiki was created it was typical for wikis to require text like "WorldWideWeb" to create a link to a page about the World Wide Web: links in MediaWiki on the other hand are created by surrounding words with double square brackets and any spaces between them are left intact e.g. World Wide Web. This change was logical for the purpose of creating an encyclopedia where accuracy in titles is important. MediaWiki uses an extensible44 lightweight wiki markup designed to be easier to use and learn than HTML. Tools exist for converting content such as tables between MediaWiki markup and HTML.45 Efforts have been made to create a MediaWiki markup spec but a consensus seems to have been reached that Wikicode requires context-sensitive grammar rules.4647 The following side-by-side comparison illustrates the differences between wiki markup and HTML: MediaWiki syntax Equivalent HTML Rendered output "Take some more tea" the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet" Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take ''less''" said the Hatter: "it's '''very''' easy to take ''more'' than nothing." <p>"Take some more <a href"titleTea" title"Tea">tea</a> " the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly.</p> <p>"I've had nothing yet" Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more."</p> <p>"You mean you can't take <i>less</i>" said the Hatter: "it's <b>very</b> easy to take <i>more</i> than nothing."</p> "Take some more tea" the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet" Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less" said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing." (Quotation above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll) Editing interface Editing interface of MediaWiki 1.9 showing the edit toolbar and some examples of wiki syntax. MediaWiki's page-editing tools have sometimes been described as somewhat challenging to learn.48 A survey of students assigned to use a MediaWiki-based wiki found that when they were asked an open question about main problems with the wiki 24% cited technical problems with formatting e.g. "Couldn't figure out how to get an image in. Can't figure out how to show a link with words; it inserts a number."49 To make editing long pages easier MediaWiki allows the editing of a subsection of a page (as identified by its header). A user can also indicate whether or not an edit is minor. Correcting spelling grammar or punctuation are examples of minor edits whereas adding paragraphs of new text is an example of a non-minor edit. Sometimes while one user is editing a second user saves an edit to the same part of the page. Then when the first user attempts to save the page an edit conflict occurs. The second user is then given an opportunity to merge his content into the page as it now exists following the first user's page save. An optional extension gives selected user groups priority when edit conflicts occur.50 MediaWiki has the user interface in different languages. A language for the wiki content itself can also be set to be sent in the "Content-Language" HTTP header and "lang" HTML attribute. Application Programming Interface MediaWiki has an extensible Application Programming Interface that provides direct high-level access to the data contained in the MediaWiki databases. Client programs can use the API to login get data and post changes. The API supports thin web-based JavaScript clients and end-user applications (such as vandal-fighting tools). The API can be accessed by the backend of another web site.51 An extensive Python bot library Pywikipediabot52 and a popular semi-automated tool called AutoWikiBrowser also interface with the API.53 The API is accessed via URLs such as http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.phpactionquery&listrecentchanges. In this case the query would be asking Wikipedia for information relating to the last 10 edits to the site. One of the perceived advantages of the API is its language independence; it listens for HTTP connections from clients and can send a response in a variety of formats such as XML serialized PHP YAML or JSON.54 Client code has been developed to provide layers of abstraction to the API.55 Rich content Images can be arranged in galleries a feature that is used extensively for Wikimedia's media archive Wikimedia Commons. 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. 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. The software has become 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. There is also support for Exif metadata. 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. Because any WYSIWYG editor would have to know wikitext grammar and no full grammar for wikitext exists MediaWiki currently provides no native WYSIWYG support.56 It does come with a customizable graphical toolbar for simplifying the process of learning the wiki syntax.57 Various extensions exist for handling WYSIWYG editing to different degrees58 some using variations of the popular CKEditor. Wikia a popular wiki farm uses a WYSIWYG extension that being designed to be a modal editor allows the user to flip back and forth between WYSIWYG and WikiText and Preview modes in a single editing session.citation needed MediaWiki also has an interface to allow the transparent use of external editors for uploaded files and wiki pages.59 Tracking edits Among the features of MediaWiki to assist in tracking edits is a Recent Changes feature that provides a list of recent edits to the wiki. This list contains basic information about those edits such as the editing user the edit summary the page edited as well as any tags (e.g. "possible malware link")60 added by customizable abuse filters and other extensions to aid in combating unhelpful edits.61 On more active wikis so many edits occur that it is hard to track Recent Changes manually. Anti-vandal software including user-assisted tools62 and fully automated bots63 are sometimes employed on such wikis to process Recent Changes items. Server load can be reduced by sending a continuous feed of Recent Changes to an IRC channel that these tools can monitor eliminating their need to send requests for a refreshed Recent Changes feed to the API.64 Another important tool is watchlisting. Each logged-in user has a watchlist to which he can add whatever pages he wishes. When an edit is made to one of those pages a summary of that edit appears on the watchlist the next time it is refreshed.65 As with the recent changes page recent edits that appear on the watchlist contain clickable links for easy review of the article history and specific changes made. There is also capability to review all edits made by any particular user. In this way if an edit is identified as problematic it is possible to check the user's other edits for issues. This feature is also useful for teachers of classes in which grades for group projects are determined by the contributions of individual students to a wiki. One teacher notes "Since all the work is done on the wiki the teacher can see everything that is and is not being done. That makes early intervention possible whenever it is necessary."66 Another educator who had his students use MediaWiki writes:7 One thing they didnt have to worry aboutand herein lies to my mind one of the greatest virtues of the wiki as a tool for collaborative workwas that some contributors might walk away with a high grade in exchange for little effort freeloading off the commitment of others. I showed them how the wiki enabled meand themto track each users participation in the project. In the end a student whose contribution amounted to a few brief marginal paragraphs earned a C- for the assignment while two students who contributed a large quantity of excellent material earned a grade of A+. Other grades ranged from B- to A. MediaWiki allows one to link to specific versions of articles. This has been useful to the scientific community in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article.67 Navigation Navigation through the wiki is largely through internal wikilinks. These implement page existence detection in which a link is colored blue if the target page exists on the local wiki and red if it does not. When a user clicks on a red link he is prompted to create an article with that title. Page existence detection makes it practical for users to create "wikified" articles  that is articles containing links to other pertinent subjects  without those other articles being yet in existence. The red/blue distinction alerts : readers lacking an interest in creating new articles of broken links that it would be fruitless for them to click upon editors interested in creating new articles of what topics their efforts might be usefully applied to. Interwiki links function much the same way as namespaces. A set of interwiki prefixes can be configured to cause for instance a page title of wikiquote:Jimbo Wales to direct the user to the Jimbo Wales article on Wikiquote.68 Unlike internal wikilinks interwiki links lack page existence detection functionality and accordingly there is no way to tell whether a blue interwiki link is broken or not. Content organization Page tabs and associated pages MediaWiki page tabs. The red coloration of the "discussion" tab indicates that the article does not yet have a talk page. As with any other red wikilink clicking on it prompts the user to create the page. Page tabs are displayed at the top of pages. These tabs allow users to perform actions or view pages that are related to the current page. The available default actions include viewing editing and discussing the current page. The specific tabs displayed depend on whether or not the user is logged into the wiki and whether the user has sysop privileges on the wiki. For instance the ability to move a page or add it to one's watchlist is usually restricted to logged-in users. The site administrator can add or remove tabs by using JavaScript or installing extensions.69 Each page has an associated history page from which the user can access every version of the page that has ever existed and generate diffs between two versions of his choice. Users' contributions are displayed not only here but also via a "user contributions" option on a sidebar. Carl Challborn & Teresa Reimann note that "While this feature may be a slight deviation from the collaborative ego-less spirit of wiki purists it can be very useful for educators who need to assess the contribution and participation of individual student users."70 Namespaces "Talk page" redirects here for talk pages on Wikipedia see Help:Using talk pages MediaWiki provides many features beyond hyperlinks for structuring content. One of the earliest features is namespaces. One of Wikipedia's earliest problems had been the separation of encyclopedic content from pages pertaining to maintenance and communal discussion as well as personal pages about encyclopedia editors. Namespaces are prefixes before a page title (such as "User:" or "Talk:") that serve as descriptors for the page's purpose and allow multiple pages with different functions to exist under the same title. For instance a page titled "The Terminator" in the default namespace could describe the 1984 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger while a page titled "User:The Terminator" could be a profile describing a user who chooses this name as a pseudonym. More commonly each page and each namespace has an associated "Talk:" page which can be used to discuss its contents such as "User talk:" or "Template talk:". The purpose of having discussion pages is to allow content to be separated from discussion surrounding the content.7172 Namespaces can be viewed as folders that separate different basic types of information or functionality. Custom namespaces can be added by the site administrators. There are 16 namespaces by default for content with 2 "pseudo-namespaces" used for dynamically generated "Special:" pages and links to media files. Each namespace on MediaWiki is numbered: content page namespaces have even numbers and their associated talk page namespaces have odd numbers.73 Category Tags Users can create new categories and add pages and files to those categories by appending one or more category tags to the content text. Adding these tags creates links at the bottom of the page that take the reader to the list of all pages in that category making it easy to browse related articles.74 The use of categorization to organize content has been described as a combination of : Collaborative tagging systems like del.icio.us and Hierarchical classifications like the Dewey Decimal Classification.75 Subpages In addition to namespaces content can be ordered using subpages. This simple feature provides automatic breadcrumbs of the pattern Page title/Subpage title from the page after the slash (in this case "Subpage title") to the page before the slash (in this case "Page title"). 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. 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.76 Another example is wikEd a full-featured MediaWiki-integrated text editor that provides syntax highlighting and search and replace functions.42 A screenshot of a wiki using Mediawiki with a customized skin 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. Using an extension77 it is also possible for a user to create personal scripts and to choose whether certain sitewide scripts should apply to him by toggling the appropriate options in the user preferences page. Templates 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 that can be dynamically loaded inside another page whenever that page is requested. The template is a special link in double curly brackets (for example "DisputeddateOctober 2008") which calls the template (in this case located at Template:Disputed) to load in place of the template. Templates support parameters so that parts of the text can be substituted for each specific use case. A related method called template substitution (called by adding subst: at the beginning of a template link) 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. This can lead to inconsistency when using templates but may be useful in certain cases and in most cases requires fewer server resources (the actual amount of savings can vary depending on wiki configuration and the complexity of the template). Templates have found many different uses. Templates enable users to create complex table layouts that are used consistently across multiple pages and where only the content of the tables gets inserted using template parameters. Templates are often used to identify problems with a Wikipedia article by putting a template in the article. This template then outputs a graphical box stating that the article content is disputed or in need of some other attention and also categorize it so that articles of this nature can be located. Templates are also used on user pages to send users standard messages welcoming them to the site78 giving them awards for outstanding contributions7980 warning them when their behavior is considered inappropriate81 notifying them when they are blocked from editing82 and so on. Groups and restriction of access MediaWiki offers flexibility in creating and defining user groups. For instance it would be possible to create an arbitrary "ninja" group that can block users and delete pages and whose edits are hidden by default in the recent changes log. It is also possible to set up a group of "autoconfirmed" users that one becomes a member of after making a certain number of edits and waiting a certain number of days.83 Some groups that are enabled by default are bureaucrats and sysops. Bureaucrats have power to change other users' rights. Sysops have power over page protection and deletion and the blocking of users from editing. MediaWiki's available controls on editing rights have been deemed sufficient for publishing and maintaining important documents such as a manual of standard operating procedures in a hospital.84 When a page consists only of useless content there are several ways to remove said content. The simplest way available to all users is simply to blank the page. However this interferes with page existence detection unless an extension is installed to treat blanked pages as though they were nonexistent.85 Blanking also leaves the content accessible through the history page an outcome that while potentially increasing transparency by allowing non-sysops to easily review the content removal decision for appropriateness might be unacceptable or even unlawful86 in some cases. Another option is for a sysop to delete the page and thereby prevent it from being viewed by non-sysops. Another level of deletion called RevisionDelete can be used by a group (e.g. "Oversighters") to prevent a page from being viewed by non-members of that group.87 It is also possible using certain extensions to remove content from being viewed through any of the normal channels on the wiki88 or even to completely delete revisions from the database.89 MediaWiki comes with a basic set of features related to restricting access but its original and ongoing design is driven by functions that largely relate to content not content segregation. As a result with minimal exceptions (related to specific tools and their related "Special" pages) page access control has never been a high priority in core development and developers have stated that users requiring secure user access and authorisation controls should not rely on MediaWiki since it was never designed for these kinds of situations. For instance it is extremely difficult to create a wiki where only certain users can read and access some pages.90 Here wiki engines like TWiki MoinMoin and WikkaWiki provide more flexibility by supporting advanced security mechanisms like access control lists. Extensibility The MediaWiki codebase contains various "hooks" using callback functions to add additional PHP code in an extensible way. This allows developers to write extensions without necessarily needing to modify 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 or core patches are required. Five main extension points were created to allow developers to add features and functionalities to MediaWiki. Hooks are run every time a certain event happens; for instance the ArticleSaveComplete hook occurs after a save article request has been processed.91 This can be used for example by an extension that notifies selected users whenever a page edit occurs on the wiki from new or anonymous users.92 New tags can be created to process data with opening and closing tags (<newtag>...</newtag>).93 Parser functions can be used to create a new command (#if:.........).94 New special pages can be created to perform a specific function. These pages are dynamically generated. For example a special page might show all pages that have one or more links to an external site or it might create a form providing user submitted feedback.95 Skins allow users to customize the look and feel of MediaWiki.96 A minor extension point allows the use of Amazon S3 to host image files.97 Extensions Main article: MediaWiki extension The Semantic MediaWiki extension Resources to developers MediaWiki can be made more advanced and useful for various purposes through its extensions. These extensions vary greatly in complexity. The Wikimedia Foundation operates a Subversion server where many extensions are hosted and a directory of them can be found on the MediaWiki website. Some other sites also known for development of  or support for  extensions are MediaWiki.org which maintains an extension matrix;10 and Google Code.98 Some MediaWiki developers especially new ones are granted access to commit changes to extensions only rather than the entire codebase. MediaWiki code review is itself facilitated through a MediaWiki extension.99 Since version 1.16 MediaWiki also used the jQuery library.100 For parser functions Among the most popular extensions is a parser function extension ParserFunctions that allows different content to be rendered based on the result of conditional statements.101 These conditional statements can perform functions such as evaluating whether a parameter is empty comparing strings evaluating mathematical expressions and returning one of two values depending on whether a page exists. It was designed as a replacement for a notoriously inefficient template called Qif.102 Schindler recounts the history of the ParserFunctions extension as follows:24 In 2006 some Wikipedians discovered that through an intricate and complicated interplay of templating features and CSS they could create conditional wiki text i.e. text that was displayed if a template parameter had a specific value. This included repeated calls of templates within templates which bogged down the performance of the whole system. The developers faced the choice of either disallowing the spreading of an obviously desired feature by detecting such usage and explicitly disallowing it within the software or offer an efficient alternative. The latter was done by Tim Starling who announced the introduction of parser functions wiki text that calls functions implemented in the underlying software. At first only conditional text and the computation of simple mathematical expressions was implemented but this already increased the possibilities for wiki editors enormously. With time further parser functions were introduced finally leading to a framework that allowed the simple writing of extension function to add arbitrary functionalities like e.g. geo-coding services or widgets. This time the developers were clearly reacting to the demand of the community being forced either to fight the solution of the issue that the community had (i.e. conditional text) or offer an improved technical implementation to replace the previous practice and achieve an overall better performance. Another parser functions extension StringFunctions was developed to allow evaluation of string length string position and so on. Wikimedia communities having created awkward workarounds to accomplish the same functionality103 clamored for it to be enabled on their projects.104 Much of its functionality was eventually integrated into the ParserFunctions extension105 albeit disabled by default and accompanied by a warning from Tim Starling that enabling string functions would allow users "to implement their own parsers in the ugliest most inefficient programming language known to man: MediaWiki wikitext with ParserFunctions."106 For footnotes and academic-related display Another very popular extension is a citation extension that enable footnotes to be added to pages using inline references.107 This extension has however been criticized for being difficult to use and requiring the user to memorize complex syntax. A tool called ProveIt was proposed as a replacement.108 A gadget called RefToolbar has also been created to make it easier to create citations using common templates.109 MediaWiki has some extensions that are well-suited for academia such as mathematics extensions110 and an extension that allows molecules to be rendered in 3D.111 Integration A generic Widgets framework has been created that allows MediaWiki to integrate with virtually anything. Other examples of extensions that could improve a wiki are category suggestion extensions112 and extensions for inclusion of Flash Videos113 YouTube videos114 and RSS feeds.115 An extension to integrate with Facebook is forthcoming.116 Metavid a site that archives video footage of the U.S. Senate and House floor proceedings was created using code extending MediaWiki into the domain of collaborative video authoring.117 One extension Viskimap makes use of graphic organizers to visualize the relationships between content pages so that students can easily get an understanding of the content elements and their relations as they navigate through the wiki pages.118 Combating linkspam There are many spambots that search the Internet for MediaWiki installations and add linkspam to them despite the fact that MediaWiki uses the nofollow attribute to discourage such attempts at search engine optimization.119 Part of the problem is that third party republishers such as mirrors may not independently implement the nofollow tag on their websites so marketers can still get PageRank benefit by inserting links into pages when those entries appear on third party websites.120 Anti-spam extensions have been developed to combat the problem by introducing CAPTCHAs121 blacklisting certain URLs122 and allowing bulk deletion of pages recently added by a particular user.123 Searches and queries MediaWiki's weak query functionality based mostly upon text searches has inspired the creation of extensions adding complex new behavior to the wiki syntax. Systems that assist in analyzing relationships among editors articles revisions topics and words have attracted considerable attention from the academic community both in terms of papers published124 and programming projects attempted.125 They have been deemed necessary to make the software suitable for applications such as some scientific databases.126127 Example of extensions facilitating such analyses include Semantic MediaWiki which provides the ability to add structured and searchable relations and attributes to wiki pages and WikiTrust which implements a system for checking the author origin and reliability of wiki text. SNPedia NeuroLex and DBpedia are projects along these lines. A Software Organization Platform intended to support specific software engineering activities such as experience management requirements engineering or project management was based upon Semantic MediaWiki.128 Another wiki SynBioSS Wiki whose purpose is to enable the scientific community to store and retrieve information related to synthetic biology efforts likewise sought to overcome MediaWiki's limitations in this regard by creating database fields for species ids complex ids etc.; new species and such could be added through a special page. A modified MediaWiki search engine was also part of that project.129 SMW was itself extended by the introduction of content types bidirectional relationships controlled vocabularies user-friendly user interfaces (including for instance autocompletion) and Web 2.0 techniques for visualization and interaction options.130 An extension called Woogle131 was created in an attempt to combine the advantages of wikis in capturing new information in a lightweight and collaborative fashion and of enterprise search engines in locating existing documents and information in an organization.132 Since by default creating and changing tables is a manual process with inconsistencies likely to occur among tables that display the same data in different ways the DynaTable extension was created to provide wiki users with a convenient way to define data in a separate namespace resulting in the data being stored in a database table and have it be dynamically retrieved from the database at the time of the wiki page parsing or rendering to pages that have the appropriate tag (and needed parameters). The extension also allows users to filter tables by selecting a subset of columns and rows to display.133 Database A schematic of the MediaWiki database structure. MediaWiki can use either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. There is limited support for Oracle Database.134 SQLite support is mostly functional but still in active development.135 A MediaWiki database contains several dozen tables including a page table that contains page titles page ids and other metadata;136 and a revision table to which is added a new row every time an edit is made containing the page id a brief textual summary of the change performed the user name of the article editor (or its IP address the case of an unregistered user) and a timestamp.137138 In a 4.5 year period the MediaWiki database had 170 schema versions.139 The most complex schema change was introduced in MediaWiki 1.5. Prior to this version the cur table stored the content and metadata of the current revisions of the wiki's pages or articles and table old stored the previous revisions. The 1.5 upgrade moved the article-specific metadata into the page table the revision-specific metadata into the revision table and the content of the revisions into the text table. The goals of this major restructuring were to improve performance (e.g. by separating metadata from content to allow faster aggregation) and to support new features (e.g. renaming articles without having to modify all their past revisions). When this upgrade was applied to Wikipedia the encyclopedia was locked for editing and the schema was converted to the new version in about 22 hours. Some software enhancement proposals such as a proposal to allow sections of articles to be watched via watchlist have been rejected because the necessary schema changes would have required excessive Wikipedia downtime.140 Performance and storage Because it is used to run one of the highest-traffic sites on the Web Wikipedia MediaWiki performance and scalability have been highly optimized.21 MediaWiki supports Squid 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. According to Wikimedia Networking Coordinator Mark Bergsma MediaWiki developers have attempted to optimize the software by not doing anything stupid avoiding expensive algorithms database queries etc. caching every result that is expensive and has temporal locality of reference and focusing on the hot spots in the code through profiling.141 MediaWiki code is designed to allow for data to be written to a master database and read from slave databases although the master can be used for some read operations if the slaves are not yet up to date. Metadata such as article revision history article relations (links categories etc.) user accounts and settings can be stored in core databases and cached; the actual revision text being more rarely used can be stored as append-only blobs in external storage. The software is suitable for the operation of large scale wiki farms such as Wikimedia which had about 750 wikis as of December 2007. However MediaWiki comes with no built-in GUI to manage such installations. Empirical evidence shows most revisions in MediaWiki databases tend to differ only slightly from previous revisions Therefore subsequent revisions of an article can be concatenated and then compressed achieving very high data compression ratios of up to 100x.141 Limitations 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 (for example in Extended BackusNaur form (EBNF)) there is an inherent difficulty in creating a WYSIWYG editor or complete porting of the syntax to another language. Being designed for very high-traffic websites such as Wikipedia MediaWiki may not be so suitable for smaller sites where disk space or memory are bigger restrictions than bandwidth. MediaWiki is not designed to be a suitable replacement for dedicated online forum or blogging software142 although extensions do exist to allow the creation of forum threads143 and to implement some bliki functionality.144 It is not uncommon for new MediaWiki users to make certain mistakes such as forgetting to sign posts with four tildes ()145 or manually entering a plaintext signature146 due to unfamiliarity with the idiosyncratic particulars involved in communication on MediaWiki discussion pages. On the other hand the format of these discussion pages has been cited as a strength by one educator who stated that it provides "more fine-grain capabilities for discussion than traditional threaded discussion forums. For example instead of 'replying' to an entire message the participant in a discussion can create a hyperlink to a new wiki page on any word from the original page. Discussions are easier to follow since the content is available via hyperlinked wiki page rather than a series of reply messages on a traditional threaded discussion forum. However except in few cases students were not using this capability possibly because of their familiarity with the traditional linear discussion style and a lack of guidance on how to make the content more 'link-rich'."147 MediaWiki has little support for creation of dynamically assembled documents or pages that monitor other pages. While it is possible to create new "special" pages it requires coding an extension in PHP and thus administrative rights to the server running MediaWiki. Work was done in 2008 on a structural query language (MediaWiki Query Language  MWQL) to allow users to add dynamically evaluated searches to ordinary wiki-pages.148 Although this was recognized as being potentially expensive solutions such as extending the caching framework to allow parts of pages to be cached and performing searches on dedicated search machines replicating the main databases were recommended.149 The Semantic MediaWiki extension also provides similar features. Upgrading MediaWiki has also historically been a bit troublesome; only 5 out of the 55 possible upgrades among MediaWiki versions V1.1V1.11 can be performed online through a rolling upgrade.150 Security MediaWiki developers have enacted security standards both for core code and extensions.151 SQL queries and HTML output are usually done through wrapper functions that handle validation escaping filtering for prevention of cross-site scripting and SQL injection.152 As of April 2010 approximately 50 of MediaWiki's extensions had unresolved security issues.153 Many security issues have had to be patched after a MediaWiki version release154 and accordingly MediaWiki.org states "The most important security step you can take is to keep your software up to date" by subscribing to the announcement listserv and installing security updates that are announced.155 PHPIDS Extension for Mediawiki developed to identify intrusions 156 Developer's community MediaWiki developers are spread around the world though with a majority in the United States and Europe. Face-to-face meetings and programming sessions occur at the annual Wikimania conference157 an event that is mostly Wikipedia-focused. Two events exclusively for MediaWiki developers have been held so far in April 2009 and April 2010 both in Berlin.158159 Support To support MediaWiki users there are : The Support Desk on MediaWiki.org. An official mailing list Mediawiki-l. Several books have been written about MediaWiki administration6160 including some free online books.161162 An unofficial forum at MWusers.com Comparison to other online collaboration software Due to MediaWiki's use on Wikipedia most users are familiar with MediaWiki's functions and layout. Compared to other wikis MediaWiki is also fairly aesthetically pleasing though simple and has an easily customized side menu and stylesheet.163 However in one assessment Confluence was deemed to be a superior product due to its very usable API and ability to better support multiple wikis.111 Wiki providers Socialtext and JotSpot have/had project management features that MediaWiki lacks.164 A study was done at the University of Hong Kong comparing TWiki to MediaWiki. The authors noted that TWiki has been considered as a collaborative tool for development of educational papers and technical projects whereas MediaWiki's fame is mostly due to Wikipedia. Although both platforms allow discussion and tracking of progress TWiki has a "Report" part that MediaWiki lacks. Students perceived MediaWiki as being easier to use and more enjoyable than TWiki. When asked whether they recommended using MediaWiki for knowledge management course group project 15 out of 16 respondents expressed their preference for MediaWiki giving answers of great certainty such as of course for sure.165 TWiki and MediaWiki both have flexible plug-in architecture.166 A study that compared students' experience with MediaWiki to that with Google Documents found that students gave the latter a much higher rating on user-friendly layout.167 Version history Colour Meaning Red Release no longer supported Green Release still supported Blue Future release The following table contains the release history of MediaWiki showing all of its release versions. Version number Date Links Notable changes 1.1 December 8 2003 Full release notes New wiki table syntax. User-editable interface messages through "MediaWiki namespace". XML-wrapped page source export with optional history. "Magic words"  special variables and parser instructions. 1.2 March 24 2004 Full release notes Experimental web-based installer. Image resizing and thumbnail generation. Editing toolbar for learning wiki syntax. User rights management within the wiki. 1.3 August 11 2004 Full release notes New highly CSS-based default look and feel ("MonoBook" skin) and better web standards compliance. Parametrized templates. Category feature. Automatic merging of edit conflicts when possible. Improved installation. 1.4 March 20 2005 Full release notes Language support User interface language can be changed by the user. Significant performance improvements. Support for compressing old revisions of articles to reduce storage needs. Image gallery generation list of recently uploaded images. SVG rasterization support (requires external support tools). 1.5 (last version to support MySQL 3) October 5 2005 Full release notes Language support Major database redesign decoupling text storage from revision tracking resulting in: Significant performance boosts for some operations. Permalink functionality for all revisions. Support for storing bulk data outside the main database. Support for e-mail notification upon changes. Page content must be encoded in UTF-8. 1.6 (last version to support PHP 4) April 5 2006 Full release notes Language support Page protection/unprotection uses a new expanded form. "Job queue" for background updates. Improved tracking of template usage. Template parameters can have default values. 1.7 July 7 2006 Full release notes Language support MediaWiki 1.7 requires PHP 5 (5.1 recommended). PHP 4 is no longer supported. Deleted files can now be restored. 1.8 October 10 2006 Full release notes Language support Full support for PostgreSQL (8.1 or better) database backend Support for DjVu thumbnailing and multipage navigation Various improvements to user blocking; blocks can be made to affect only unregistered users using a particular IP address Uploading files from publicly accessible URLs is possible if enabled 1.9 January 10 2007 Full release notes Language support "Undo revision" feature Various improvements to blocking and special page caching Tables with sortable columns Addition of an edit counter field to the user database Revision size displayed on watchlists and recent changes The names of Special: pages can now be localized so links and URLs to them are more legible in languages that aren't English. 1.10 May 9 2007 Full release notes Language support "Cascading protection" feature Improved tooltips and accesskey feature Various improvements to blocking and special page caching IPv6 support 1.11 September 10 2007 Full release notes Language support $wgAddGroups and $wgRemoveGroups are added to allow finer control over usergroup assignment AJAX-based page watching has been cleaned up and enabled by default 1.12 March 20 2008 Full release notes Language support Internationalization and localization has made a huge step forward; a lot more translations new translations are now also committed to 1.12 Special:Version is localizable support for Hebrew Thai and Iranian calendar. Parser preprocessor rewritten Userrights interface improved and generalized 1.13 August 14 2008 Full release notes Language support New special pages: FileDuplicateSearch ListGroupRights Special:UserRights and Special:SpecialPages have been redesigned Hidden category feature: HIDDENCAT on a category page hides the category on the article page. Friendlier behaviour for users who click a red link but can't edit Double redirects created by a page move can be fixed automatically 1.14 February 22 2009 Full release notes Language support Supports a plaintext copyright notice (other than Creative Commons or GFDL) Images can link to an arbitrary title or URL Search engine indexing can be controlled on a per-page basis Better CSS support for handheld devices Page history pages now have a date selector File upload history pages now display thumbnails for every file version 1.15 June 10 2009 Full release notes Language support Supports filename moving Added keywords GENDER: NUMBEROFACTIVEUSERS and REVISIONUSER 1.16 July 28 2010 Full release notes Language support The new skin Vector was added RSS/Atom feeds are now included in the watchlist Blocking users from sending email via Special:Emailuser is now possible 1.17 1.17 started as of February 2010 in beta as of May 2011 Full release notes Language support New Installer Resource Loader 1.18 1.18 started as of December 2010 being stabilized as of May 2011 Full release notes Language support 1.19 1.19 started as of May 2011 Full release notes Language support See also Free software portal Comparison of wiki software List of content management systems List of MediaWiki websites List of wiki software Multilingual MediaWiki References a b "MediaWiki history". 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"A Platform for Collaborative Management of Semantic Grid Metadata". Intelligent distributed computing systems and applications. p. 123.  "Extension:Woogle4MediaWiki". MediaWiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Woogle4MediaWiki. Retrieved 2010-05-30.  Hans-Jrg Happel (2009) Woogle  On Why and How to Marry Wikis with Enterprise Search http://subs.emis.de/LNI/Proceedings/Proceedings145/gi-proc-145-015.pdf  Arnold Carrie (2009) DynaTable: a Wiki extension for structured data ISBN 978-1-60558-730-1  "Manual:Database access". MediaWiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Databaseaccess. Retrieved 2010-05-30.  "Manual:SQLite". MediaWiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/SQLite. Retrieved 2010-05-30.  "Manual:Page table". MediaWiki. 2010-05-15. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pagetable. Retrieved 2010-05-30.  "Manual:Revision table". MediaWiki. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Revisiontable. 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MediaWiki. 2010-03-22. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Security. Retrieved 2010-05-30.  "MediaWiki Extension". http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:PhpIds. Retrieved 2011-02-20.  2009 Wikimania Codeathon Developer meet-up 2009 Wikimedia Developer Workshop 2010 homepage Rahman Mizanur (2007). MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install manage and customize your MediaWiki installation. Packt Publishing. ISBN 1904811590. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfmid1526285.  MediaWiki Administrator's Handbook. Wikibooks. http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWikiAdministrator%27sHandbook.  MediaWiki User Guide Wikibooks http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/MediaWikiUserGuide  Bryant Todd (2006) Social Software in Academia Educause Quarterly http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/EQM0627.pdf  Bean L. & Hott D. D. (2005 July/August) Wiki: A speedy new tool to manage projects Journal of Corporate Accounting & Finance pp. 38  Liang M. Chu S. Siu F. & Zhou A. (Dec. 34 2009) Comparing User Experiences in Using Twiki & Mediawiki to Facilitate Collaborative Learning Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Knowledge Management http://www.edu.hku.hk/samchu/docs/2009userexperiences.pdf  Schulz Judith (2009) Company-Wiki as a knowledge transfer instrument for reducing the shortage of skilled workers Institute of Technology and Education http://elib.suub.uni-bremen.de/ip/docs/00010611.pdf  Chu S. Kennedy D. & Mak M. (December 34 2009) MediaWiki and Google Docs as online collaboration tools for group project co-construction Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Knowledge Management http://www.edu.hku.hk/samchu/docs/2009mediawiki.pdf  External links Wikimedia Commons has media related to: MediaWiki MediaWiki homepage with Hubs for users system administrators and developers. MediaWiki on the Meta-Wiki Wikimedia's meta website. 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