Wikipedia: MediaWiki

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Contents

1 Current status

2 History

2.1 Change from Phase II to Phase III

3 Related topics

4 See also

Current status

You can download the latest copy of the m:MediaWiki package from Sourceforge at the MediaWiki Project page.

History

Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects run on the same GPL-ed free software, called MediaWiki or Software Phase III (see m:MediaWiki). It was switched from UseModWiki software ("Phase I") to new software, written especially for Wikipedia using the PHP programming language, on January 25, 2002 ("Phase II"); in June 2002 it was replaced by what is now called MediaWiki.

Magnus Manske was the original author of the software, which is written in PHP and uses an underlying MySQL relational database. The software is released under the GNU General Public License. Other programmers are strongly urged to get involved.

Change from Phase II to Phase III

On Saturday, July 20, 2002, Wikipedia moved to a new high-capacity server and new, hopefully more efficient, software base. The new software was designed to look and behave as similarly to the previous phase II software as possible, but a few new features and changes should be noted:

A whole new system for uploading and using images to illustrate articles
Search function now indexes 2- and 3-letter words
New side-by-side diffs of article changes
"Floating" sidebar option for some modern web browsers
A few minor changes to wikitext syntax (see wikipedia:How does one edit a page)
Since anonymous users, while not having user pages, still have user contributions pages, their IP numbers in lists such as Recentchanges and article histories link to their contributions
Support for maths formulae using Wikipedia:TeX markup
Better support for auto-posting "bots"
A new static page caching system has greatly reduced system load
The database server and the page server now run on separate machines

The Phase III software is robust, and under active development. Many more features have been, and are expected to be, added to the Phase III software, together with bug fixes and improvements in stability. You are encouraged to submit bug reports.