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MediaWiki
Original authors
DeveloperWikimedia Foundation
Initial releaseJanuary 25, 2002; 24 years ago (2002-01-25)
Stable release
1.45.3[1] Edit this on Wikidata
Written inPHP[2]
Operating systemWindows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris
Size79.05 MiB (compressed)
Available in459[3] languages
TypeWiki software
LicenseGPLv2+[4]
Websitewww.mediawiki.org Edit this at Wikidata
Repository

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software system originally developed by Magnus Manske and released for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002, and further enhanced by Lee Daniel Crocker,[5][6] after which development has been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software.[7] Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom, wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia.

MediaWiki is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database. The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second.[7][8] Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been a major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages.[9] The software has hundreds of configuration settings[10] and more than 1,000 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed.[11]