Editing MediaWiki Development Services (section)

== History and Origins of MediaWiki ==

=== Early Development (2002–2004) ===

The software now known as MediaWiki began as ''Phase II'' wiki software, written in PHP by Magnus Manske in 2001. It was first deployed on the English Wikipedia in January 2002, replacing an earlier Perl-based system known as UseModWiki. The new software offered substantially improved performance and a cleaner architecture suitable for the rapidly expanding encyclopaedia.

In 2003, developer Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the codebase — a version designated ''Phase III'' — to address scalability demands as Wikipedia's traffic surged. This rewrite introduced many architectural patterns still present in modern MediaWiki, including a MySQL-backed relational database, namespace-based page organisation, and a template transclusion system.

=== Naming and Community Growth (2004–2010) ===

The name "MediaWiki" was officially adopted in 2004 to distinguish the software from the broader Wikimedia project and to signal its availability for third-party use. The Wikimedia Foundation released the software under the '''GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2)''', enabling any individual or organisation to deploy, modify, and redistribute it freely.

Between 2004 and 2010, MediaWiki's extension system matured significantly. Community developers published hundreds of extensions through what is now known as MediaWiki.org, the official hub for documentation, extension listings, and skin repositories. During this period, large-scale deployments outside Wikimedia — including corporate wikis, government knowledge bases, and educational platforms — became increasingly common.

=== Enterprise Adoption and Semantic Extension (2010–Present) ===

The 2010s saw two important trends in MediaWiki's evolution. First, the platform gained traction in enterprise settings, driven partly by the success of [[Semantic MediaWiki]] (SMW) — an extension that allows pages to carry structured, queryable data, effectively turning a wiki into a lightweight knowledge graph. Second, the Wikimedia Foundation's investment in responsive design led to the introduction of new default skins, including '''Vector''' (2010) and its successor '''Vector 2022''', which modernised the interface and improved mobile compatibility.

As of 2024, MediaWiki powers over 50,000 websites worldwide, including corporate intranets, public-facing documentation portals, government transparency initiatives, research databases, and community-run reference projects. Its active developer community has published more than '''1,000 extensions''' and '''200 skins'''.