Architecture Repository/Artifacts/What is MediaWiki?

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This is an opinion document seeking to answer the question: what is MediaWiki? It defines basic concepts and then presents the defining characteristics and fundamental functionality of the current state of the MediaWiki platform. It also documents functionality that exists to support those key aspects of the platform.

Status: v1 published

Introduction
MediaWiki is extensible FLOSS wiki software with a multilingual interface for versioned content on the web.

This is an opinion document seeking to answer the question: what is MediaWiki? It defines basic concepts and then presents the defining characteristics and fundamental functionality of the current state of the MediaWiki platform. It also documents functionality that exists to support those key aspects of the platform.

This document intentionally does not address issues of implementation. Most of the functionality discussed currently resides in MediaWiki core, but some is in MediaWiki extensions. For the purposes of this document, the distinction between core and extensions is not considered.

Basic Concepts
The basic concepts of MediaWiki are content, pages, revisions, and actors:

Defining Characteristics
Following are the defining characteristics of MediaWiki, resulting from design decisions in the core platform.

Fundamental Functionality
The fundamental functionality provided by the MediaWiki platform, which provides its unique style of wiki capabilities and satisfies the defining characteristics above, is as follows:

Operational Functionality
When implementing a wiki, these functionalities are used to support the implementation and operation of the fundamental functionality.