MediaWiki is the name of the software which is used to run the Wikipedia and it's "sister" sites, which collectively are called "wikimedia" (I find these cute names confusing).

The general idea behind MediaWiki is the same as all wikis -- to make it easy for a group to create and update documents. The markup language used by MediaWiki is different in several ways from the markup language used by Twiki (the software used to run this wiki).

The documentation for MediaWiki was originally on a site called the "meta" site, but it is being migrated to a new separate site, http://www.mediawiki.org, probably in part to reduce the name confusion, but also to distinguish the underlying software as a product separate from the content hosted on the wikimedia sites. One consequence of this is that the documentation is split up between the two sites. The move from meta to mediawiki.org seems to be going very slowly, so this is likely to be how things are for a long while. There are multiple cross-links, so it's not too difficult to use once you know about the split.

External Links

• http://www.mediawiki.org
• http://meta.wikimedia.org
• http://www.wikimedia.org/

-- Main.EricMyers - 22 May 2007