Manual:$wgUseGzip/en

Details
When using the file cache, we can store the cached HTML gzipped to save disk space. Pages will then also be served compressed to clients that support it. In older versions of MediaWiki it also controlled if normal (non file-cached) pages were gzipped.

Requires zlib support to be enabled in PHP.

Between 1.2.0 and 1.3.0 (inclusive) the default value was true if the function  is defined, otherwise false. For prior and later versions it defaults to false.