By : Nidhi Gupta

MediaWiki is the PHP-based wiki engine which runs all of the Wikis on Wikia. It is a free software package developed for web-based multilingual free content encyclopedias like – Wikipedia and other wikis. MediaWiki was originally developed for Wikipedia. It is developed using MediaZilla. Later on, this took an important role in other projects of Wikimedia Foundation. Some of them are – Meta-Wiki, Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikinews and Wikimedia Download area.

MediaWiki is usable on both large and small sites, though some aspects of configuration may seem overcomplicated because MediaWiki is primarily targeted as an in-house tool for Wikipedia. It is designed to handle heavy websites containing library-like document collections, and supports user uploads of images/sounds, multilingual content, TOC auto generation, ISBN links, etc. Moreover, it keeps track of changes, so users can receive notifications, view differences and revert to edits. This system has many other features and can easily be extended.

Difference between webpage and wikitext

Wikitext is the textual content that is displayed in the edit box (text editor) and does not support all features of a webpage. It has been observed that HTML tags support comments, but in general, comments are not found in web pages. You can easily add comments to display information in the wikitext. However, wikitext lacks some features like – images, time and date of last edit, image description page, and values of the variables.

MediaWiki is a free server based software package that is licensed under the GNU General Public License. Users can easily run this software on a large server farm to manage the contents of any website.

How does MediaWiki work?

When you want to edit a page and then submit it MediaWiki writes it to the database. However, the previous versions of that page’s content are kept in the database to avoid spamming or vandalism. MediaWiki also manages images and multimedia files stored in the file system. If the wikis are large with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with Squid proxy server software.

Advantages of using MediaWiki

• MediaWiki allows you changing the Skins – you can change the logo of the wiki by altering the logo variable and can use the image you want to use as logo. You can also change the icon that is displayed in the address bar of your browser.

• MediaWiki allows you to add extensions such as Image Gallery, Forum, Mambo etc. The file upload feature lets you upload graphics and sound files.

• MediaWiki keeps track of edits. The editing features are well developed to meet users and editors needs. The syntax editing is based on UseMod, with support for mixing wiki-syntax and HTML.

• MediaWiki offers you full text search. Just click on the Go button, it will take you to the relevant content. With MediaWiki you can also search images, name of users and site stats.

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