MediaWiki

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MediaWiki

MediaWiki logo
Basic data

developer Developer list ; Wikimedia
Publishing year January 25, 2002
Current  version 1.34.2
( June 24, 2020 )
operating system platform independent
programming language PHP
category Wiki software
License GPL-2.0-or-later
German speaking Yes
www.mediawiki.org

MediaWiki is freely available content management software in the form of a wiki system. This means that any user can change the content by accessing the browser . It was originally developed for the free encyclopedia Wikipedia . MediaWiki is under the GPL license and is therefore freely available.

Structure, functions and use

Technical basis

The MediaWiki software is written in the PHP scripting language . The relational database management system MySQL or its fork MariaDB is used to store the content . Alternatively, PostgreSQL , Oracle , SQLite and others can be used as database backend , although their support is partly experimental.

Range of functions

  • Classification of the pages in categories and namespaces
  • Version management of articles and media files
  • Templates for frequently used text sections
  • Interwiki links point to other wiki-based projects. (In the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for example, interwiki links point to articles in other language versions or to other projects such as Commons.)
  • Linking the articles in several languages ​​through interlanguage links
  • Showing the last changes (also known as RSS - or nuclear - web feed )
  • User rights management:
    • Assignment of rights to freely definable user groups
    • Assignment of rights to individual users by the bureaucrat user group
    • Let administrators revoke write access for users
  • Blocking of articles for changes by different user groups
  • Full text search ( Apache Lucene search engine )
  • Individual adaptability of the appearance with CSS and the function with JavaScript and jQuery . On Wikipedia, this has resulted in a variety of additional tools.
  • Individual adaptability of the functions through extensions
  • Extensive support of almost 400 languages

history

MediaWiki has existed since 2003

MediaWiki emerged from a wiki engine that the German biochemist Magnus Manske developed for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia when the previously used UseModWiki engine was not up to the requirements. On January 25, 2002, the first version, then called Phase II , was used for the first time. After a new version mainly written by Lee Daniel Crocker, in June 2002 an improved version of the still officially nameless software was installed on the Wikipedia server . The current name MediaWiki was first proposed on a mailing list in July 2003 by developer Daniel Meyer . The logo of the software shows a sunflower surrounded by square brackets and comes from Erik Möller based on a photo by Florence Nibart-Devouard . It was chosen for the MediaWiki project in a Wikipedia competition in 2003.

In the years that followed, MediaWiki developed into a successful open source project, in which over 60 programmers and helpers were involved in 2005. In addition to Wikipedia and its Wikimedia sister projects, numerous organizations, companies and institutions now use MediaWiki.

With Semantic MediaWiki, an extension has been available since 2005 , which enables structured data to be stored on a wiki page in addition to texts and media content.

Current versions

Release version publication End of life Hints
MediaWiki 1.30 Older version; no longer supported: 1.30.x December 2017 June 2019
MediaWiki 1.31 (LTS) Older version; still supported: 1.31.x June 2018 June 2021 The Long-Term-Support (LTS) version is supported for three years. It is particularly suitable for productive environments in which major software changes should be avoided.
MediaWiki 1.32 Older version; no longer supported: 1.32.x January 2019 January 2020
MediaWiki 1.33 Older version; no longer supported: 1.33.x June 2019 June 2020
MediaWiki 1.34 Current version: 1.34.x December 2019 November 2020
MediaWiki 1.35 (LTS) Future version: 1.35.x August 2020 August 2023 The Long-Term-Support (LTS) version is supported for three years. It is particularly suitable for productive environments in which major software changes should be avoided.
MediaWiki 1.36 Future version: 1.36.x November 2020 November 2021
Legend:
Older version; no longer supported
Older version; still supported
Current version
Current preliminary version
Future version

Further information

See also

literature

  • Koren Yaron: Working with MediaWiki . 1st edition. WikiWorks Press, San Francisco, California 2012, ISBN 978-0-615-72030-2 (English).
  • Daniel J. Barrett: MediaWiki . O'Reilly, Sebastopol, California 2009, ISBN 978-0-596-51979-7 (English).
  • Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, Richard Heigl: Wiki. Cooperation on the web . 2nd Edition. Springer, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-540-35110-8 .
  • Mizanur Rahman: MediaWiki Administrators' Tutorial Guide: Install, manage, and customize your Mediawiki installation . Packt Publishing, Birmingham 2007, ISBN 978-1-84719-045-1 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ lists.wikimedia.org .
  2. ↑ github.com . (accessed June 24, 2020).
  3. ↑ Help: Interwiki Links
  4. ↑ www.mediawiki.org/wiki/JQuery
  5. ↑ Wikipedia: little helpers , JavaScript and CSS tricks
  6. ↑ Current statistics can be viewed on translatewiki.net .
  7. ^ Phase IV, Wikibooks.org/.com and WikimediaFoundation.org/.com (was Wikis and uniformity) Archive of Wikipedia-l mailing list (English)
  8. ↑ International logo contest / Results Result of the competition, August 2003
  9. ↑ Current version information can be viewed at mediawiki.org