Wikipedia:MediaWiki (archive)

MediaWiki is the server software that runs Wikipedia and its sister wiki sites. See MediaWiki or MediaWiki. For details of the Mediawiki namespace see MediaWiki namespace or (for messages contained) see Special:Allmessages.''

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

Configuration status
Test. You can see what version of the MediaWiki software the English Wikipedia is running by visiting Special:Version.

June 24, 2004
The following MediaWiki features are currently disabled in the English Wikipedia (and other large Wikimedia wikis) for performance reasons:
 * Individual page access counters (for the foreseeable future)
 * Most wanted, popular pages (temporary). As a temporary replacement the following static lists have been produced from a database dump: Most referenced pages, Most wanted pages

Recently, search, orphaned, short, and long pages were reenabled.

History
Wikipedia and its sister Wikimedia projects run on the same GPL-ed free software, called MediaWiki or Software Phase III (see 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 July 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.

MediaWiki was made for wikipedia and later for its sister sites and then released as the open-source MediaWiki

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:


 * 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 How to 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 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.