MediaWiki
Overview
MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software package originally developed for Wikipedia. It powers thousands of websites worldwide, from collaborative knowledge bases to enterprise documentation portals.
MediaWiki provides a powerful platform for creating and managing wiki-based content, with detailed version control to track every edit. It supports extensions and templates, allowing you to create anything from a simple knowledge base to a fully-featured encyclopedia with rich media, categories, and advanced search.
Highly customizable and scalable, MediaWiki is written in PHP and uses MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL as its database backend. It remains the most widely used wiki software on the internet.
Key Features
- Full-featured wiki engine — Complete version control with diff comparison, rollback, and page history tracking every change.
- Extension ecosystem — Thousands of extensions for adding functionality: visual editor, spam protection, maps, charts, semantic data, and more.
- Templates and skins — Reusable page templates for consistent layouts and customizable appearance via skin system.
- Advanced search — Full-text search with namespace filtering, category browsing, and external search engine integration.
- Multi-language support — Interface in hundreds of languages with translation extensions for multi-lingual wikis.
- User permissions — Fine-grained access control with user groups, protection levels, and blocking tools.
- Media management — Built-in file upload with thumbnailing, galleries, and support for images, PDFs, and other media.
Why Use MediaWiki?
MediaWiki is the gold standard for wiki software — it’s battle-tested at Wikipedia scale (billions of monthly visitors) while being equally suitable for small team wikis. Its mature extension ecosystem means you can add nearly any feature without building from scratch. The community is vast, the documentation is comprehensive, and migration tools exist for most other wiki platforms.
Use Cases
- Public knowledge bases — Powering everything from Wikipedia to specialised encyclopedias
- Enterprise documentation — Internal wikis for policies, procedures, and technical documentation
- Academic collaboration — Research wikis, course materials, and collaborative writing projects
- Software documentation — Project documentation with categories, versioned pages, and API references
Platform
Linux · macOS · Windows (PHP web server required)
Licence
GNU General Public License v2 (GPL-2.0)