MediaWiki
From Open Progress
MediaWiki is free wiki software licensed under the GNU General Public License. It is written in PHP and uses either the MySQL or PostgreSQL relational database management system. MediaWiki was first developed to serve the needs of Wikipedia, a free content wiki-based encyclopaedia, but it has since become one of the most popular general wiki solutions. Today, it is used by all projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, all wikis hosted by Wikia, and many other wikis, some being large and popular. It has also been deployed by companies as an internal knowledge management solution, and as a content management system.
MediaWiki provides a rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality. Due to the strong emphasis on multilinguality in the Wikimedia projects, internationalisation has received significant attention by developers. The user interface has been fully or partially translated into more than 70 languages, and can be further customized by site administrators (the entire interface is editable through the wiki). Because Wikipedia is one of the world's largest websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has also been a major concern for developers.
MediaWiki was chosen for the extensions needed for OmegaWiki because of its core functionality and scalability. The choice was either to develop a database application and add Wiki functionality to it or extend the best Wiki engine with database functionality. This way the Wiki functionality is not an after thought; it is an integral part of what OmegaWiki is.
