MediaWiki

MediaWiki is a wiki engine that Wikipedia and many other wikis run on.

History
In mid-2001, Magnus Manske, a developer and student at the University of Cologne and a Wikipedia editor, began working on new software that would replace UseModWiki, the wiki engine being used by Wikipedia at the time. Written in the PHP scripting language, the new software was largely developed by August 24, 2001, and it was released on the Meta Wikipedia (now the Wikimedia Foundation's meta wiki). In 2002, this software was released on the English Wikipedia and was later added to its sister projects. Many other wikis started adopting it right after its release too.

Increasing usage soon caused load problems to arise again, and soon after, another rewrite of the software began, this time being done by Lee Daniel Crocker, which became known as "phase III". This new software was also written in PHP, with a MySQL backend, and kept the basic interface of the phase II software, but with the added functionality of a wider scalability. The "phase III" software went live on Wikipedia in July 2002. In 2003, it was officialy given the name "MediaWiki". Around this time, MediaWiki's old logo was created by Erik Möller and was originally submitted to the logo contest for a new Wikipedia logo, held in from July 20 to August 27, 2003. The logo came in third place and was chosen to represent MediaWiki rather than Wikipedia. The double square brackets symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages; while the sunflower represents the diversity of content on Wikipedia, the constant growth, and also the wildness.

On April 1, 2021, MediaWiki's logo changed to one designed by Serhio Magpie.

Major milestones in MediaWiki's development have included the following: the categorization system (2004); parser functions (2006); Flagged Revisions (2008); the "ResourceLoader", a delivery system for CSS and JavaScript (2011); and the VisualEditor, a "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) editing platform (2013).

Versions

 * 1.1: Initial release, added new wiki table syntax and many other things.
 * 1.2: Added spam filter, image resizing, new blocking system, etc.
 * 1.3: MonoBook became new default skin, parameters were added to templates, and categories were added.
 * 1.4: Added "RecentChanges Patrol" to mark new unreviewed edits, logs became searchable.
 * 1.5: Page renames got their own log.
 * 1.6: Account creation form was separated from the user login form, and page protection/unprotection started using a new, expanded form.
 * 1.7: Deleted files could now be archived and undeleted.
 * 1.8: Added option to allow blocks on anonymous users only.
 * 1.9: User blocks could now be set to disable the automatic blocking of IP addresses the account logs in with, fixed XSS vulnerability in $wgUseAjax.
 * 1.10: Several special pages were added.
 * 1.11: Expanded block messages.
 * 1.12: Interface changes.