MediaWiki

mw:MediaWiki logo

MediaWiki (.org) is the software Consumerium uses on its R&D wiki which you are using right now.

It has grown a sturdy, reliable and versatile now with support for multilinguality and structured data ( in the works ) support in MediaWiki. Figuring out how to best use it's extra namespaces, templates, categories, extensions and widgets for achieving Consumium goals is of the essence of the Consumium effort.

During the years of it's evolution MediaWiki has grown to include novel ways of extending the software with possibility to have categories, extra namespaces, templates, MediaWiki/extensions and later on with MediaWiki/widgets

mw:MediaWiki history, mw:Release notes and mw:Roadmap shed light on the developments of the MediaWiki software from Magnus Manske's original "PhaseIII" code rewrite into PHP Who'd known that PHP scripts run one of the planets biggest sites Wikipedia and has thus been proven to scale to serve tens of thousands or even hundereds thousands of requests per second.

It is not however ideal as a piece of code to work with our hardware requirements or protocol requirements, e.g. it does not currently integrate with any mobile device code, chat code otherwise then that the people using the Wikis might also be using IM, such as irc or email to communicate with each other. Nor does it implement some features of the content wiki or opinion wiki that will be needed eventually to deliver Consumerium Services such as signing versions of articles, which is needed for non-centralized integrity burden of proof.

Therefore its use at present is really just a test, and to make it easier to collate text from other GFDL services, most of which also use mediawiki. Consumerium developers will have to make their choices based also on the constraints the Consumerium License might place on using GPL'd code. This might not be an issue, or it might be a huge issue, we just don't know.

The long term choices of wiki code and its integration with other code are things the Consumerium Governance Organization will decide, and this Development Wiki is here to discuss. As part of reflexive design, we will generally use the tools we are trying to test, before deciding to use them. This will often bias sysops and others in favour of what is in use now! We should be very aware of this systemic bias.

Sometimes there are issues with MediaWiki, here are some tickets.

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Sites using MediaWiki

the most popular page using MediaWiki is Wikipedia. But MediaWiki is also used by tens of thousands other different wikis, public and private. Some of the most popular wikis are:

- Wikia (a wiki farm)
- wikiHow
- WikiLeaks

It is also in use by a large amount of companies as an internal Wiki (e.g.: Novell and Intel).

Also the government makes use of MediaWiki:

- Intellipedia, used by the United States Intelligence Community and
- Diplopedia, used by United States Department of State

New features in MediaWiki by version and year

Release notes

MediaWiki	git	Years supported	Features added
1.20 (preliminary)	RELEASE-NOTES-1.20	Future
1.19	RELEASE-NOTES-1.19	Future
1.18	RELEASE-NOTES-1.18	2012
1.17	RELEASE-NOTES	2012
1.16	RELEASE-NOTES	2011
1.15	RELEASE-NOTES	2010
1.14	RELEASE-NOTES	2009
1.13	RELEASE-NOTES	2009
1.12	RELEASE-NOTES	2009
1.11	RELEASE-NOTES	2007-2008
1.10	RELEASE-NOTES	2007-2008
1.9	RELEASE-NOTES	2007	Special:-pages can be localized
1.8	RELEASE-NOTES
1.7	RELEASE-NOTES	2006	PHP4 support dropped Tracking Interlanguage links added to database
1.6	RELEASE-NOTES	2006	Templates can have default values w:CAPTCHAs introduced
1.5	RELEASE-NOTES	2005-2006	Checks for email validity by requiring validation link in the email sent to be clicked Major schema change
1.4	RELEASE-NOTES	2005-2006	"RecentChanges Patrol" New searchable logs An email notification patch for watched pages and User-pages called Enotif. See m:Enotif for more precise info Overriding interface language Ability to set rel="NOFOLLOW"
1.3	RELEASE-NOTES	2004-2005	Categories work Any number of additional namespaces, which is very good for us. Now we can have namespaces for companies, products etc. RSS & Atom feeds
1.2	RELEASE-NOTES	2004	Bureucrats ( ability to add sysops onwiki )
1.1	RELEASE-NOTES	2003	XML export wikitable syntax
pre-1.1.0

mw:Release notes need to be read through to map which functionality was added when and then in a timeline article match what the Consumium design paradigm to getter a better view.

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See also:

• other technologies we are using or planning to use