MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia. Explore its features, extensions, licensing, and top alternatives for building wikis.
MediaWiki is the free, open-source wiki software that powers Wikipedia and most of the Wikimedia Foundation's sister projects. It grew out of earlier wiki engines used in Wikipedia's first years, was rewritten in PHP in 2002, and took on the MediaWiki name in 2003 as the Wikimedia Foundation was established to support it.
Since its first official release, MediaWiki 1.1, in December 2003, it has been continuously developed by the Wikimedia Foundation together with a large open-source community, and is now used by thousands of wikis beyond the Wikimedia projects themselves.
MediaWiki is built around a lightweight wikitext markup language for content authoring, with full revision history, discussion pages, granular user permissions, and built-in full-text search. Its functionality is significantly extended through a large ecosystem of official and community extensions and skins.
Notable extensions include Wikibase, introduced in 2012 to support structured data and power Wikidata, VisualEditor, launched in 2013 to provide a WYSIWYG editing experience, and CirrusSearch, which integrates Elasticsearch for advanced search across large-scale wikis.
MediaWiki is free and open source under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later, with no licensing fees to install, run, or modify it.
Organizations can self-host MediaWiki on their own infrastructure at no software cost, or use third-party MediaWiki hosting providers that charge for managed hosting, though these are separate commercial services rather than official MediaWiki pricing.
MediaWiki is used to build collaboratively editable wikis, most notably powering Wikipedia and its sister projects, as well as thousands of independent corporate, community, and personal wikis.
Yes, MediaWiki is free and open source, licensed under the GNU General Public License version 2 or later, with no cost to download, install, or modify.
MediaWiki is maintained primarily by the Wikimedia Foundation along with a large community of volunteer developers.
MediaWiki is the underlying software; Wikipedia is one of many websites (and the most famous one) that runs on that software.
Yes, MediaWiki supports a large ecosystem of extensions and skins that add functionality such as structured data (Wikibase), WYSIWYG editing (VisualEditor), and advanced search (CirrusSearch).
Common alternatives include Confluence, DokuWiki, TikiWiki, BookStack, and more modern collaborative workspace tools like Notion, depending on the use case.