MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a free wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation and others, it is used to run all of the projects hosted by the Foundation, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Commons. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites. It is written in the PHP programming language and uses a backend database. The software's code is structured functionally.

The first version of the software was deployed to serve the needs of the free content Wikipedia encyclopedia in 2002. It has been deployed since then by many companies as a content management system for internal knowledge management. Notably, Novell uses it to operate several of its high-traffic websites. Thousands of websites use MediaWiki. Some educators have also assigned students to use MediaWiki for collaborative group projects.

The software is optimized to correctly and efficiently handle projects of all sizes, including the largest wikis, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of hits per second. 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 settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. Only on Wikipedia, more than 1000 automated and semi-automated bots and other tools have been developed to assist in editing MediaWiki sites.

Read more about MediaWiki:  License, Development, History, Sites Using MediaWiki, Key Features, Database, Performance and Storage, Limitations, Security, Developer Community, Support, Comparison To Other Online Collaboration Software