MediaWiki history/id

MediaWiki adalah perangkat lunak bebas yang awalnya (pada tahun 2001–2002) ditulis untuk Wikipedia (lalu, proyek-proyek Wikimedia) oleh komunitasnya sendiri.

Fase I: UseModWiki
Wikipedia diluncurkan pada Januari 2001. Pada sat itu, Wikipedia hanyalah sebuah eksperimen, untuk mencoba meningkatkan produksi konten untuk Nupedeia, sebuah ensiklopedia konten bebas, tetapi ditinjau sejawat, yang dibuat oleh Jimmy Wales. Karena merupakan sebuah eksperimen, Wikipedia awalnya ditenagai oleh UseModWiki, sebuah mesin wiki GPL yang sudah ada yang ditulis dalam bahasa Perl, menggunakan CamelCase dan menyimpan semua halaman dalam berkas teks individu tanpa riwayat perubahan.

Kemudian menjadi tampak bahwa CamelCase tidaklah cocok untuk dijadikan nama artikel ensiklopedia. Pada akhir Januari 2001, pengembang UseModWiki dan partisipan Wikipedia Clifford Adams menambahkan sebuah fitur baru untuk UseModWiki: pranala bebas, yaitu kemampuan menautkan halaman dengan sintaks khusus (tanda kurung siku ganda), bukannya penautan CamelCase otomatis. Beberapa minggu kemudian, Wikipedia diperbarui ke versi baru UseModWiki yang mendukung pranala bebas, lalu mengaktifkannya.

Walaupun fase awal ini bukanlah tentang MediaWiki, ini memberikan beberapa konteks dan menunjukkan bahwa, sebelum MediaWiki dibuat pun, Wikipedia mulai membentuk fitur-fitur dari perangkat lunak yang menenagai. UseModWiki juga memengaruhi beberapa fitur MediaWiki, contohnya adalah bahasa markahnya. Nostalgia Wikipedia mengandung salinan lengkap dari basis data Wikipedia pada Desember 2001, ketika Wikipedia masih menggunakan UseModWiki.

Fase II: skrip PHP
Pada 2001, Wikipedia belum menjadi situs web top 10; Wikipedia hanyalah proyek tidak terkenal yang berada di pojok gelap interweb, tidak dikenal oleh kebanyakan mesin pencari, dan dihos di satu peladen. Tetapi, performa sudah menjadi masalah, terutama karena UseModWiki menyimpan kontennya di basis data berkas datar. Pada saat yang sama, para Wikipediawan khawatir akan "dibanjiri lalu lintas" setelah mendapat artikel di New York Times, Slashdot atau Wired.

So, in summer 2001, Wikipedia participant Magnus Manske (then a university student) started to work on a dedicated Wikipedia wiki engine in his free time. He aimed to improve Wikipedia's performance using a database-driven app, and to be able to develop Wikipedia-specific features that couldn't be provided by a "generic" wiki engine. Written in PHP and MySQL-backed, the new engine was simply called the "PHP script", "PHP wiki", "Wikipedia software" or "phase II".

The "PHP script" was made available in August 2001, shared on SourceForge in September, and tested until late 2001. As Wikipedia suffered from recurring performance issues because of increasing traffic, the English language Wikipedia eventually switched from UseModWiki to the PHP script in January 2002. Other language versions also created in 2001 were slowly upgraded as well, although some of them would stay powered by UseModWiki until 2004. An automated program, called "User:Conversion script", converted the last version of the existing articles to the phase II format; Brion Vibber partly restored previous revisions of the UseModWiki history on the English Wikipedia in September 2002.

As PHP software using a MySQL database, the PHP script was the first iteration of what would later become MediaWiki. It also introduced many critical features still in use today, like namespaces to organize content (including talk pages), skins, and special pages (including maintenance reports, a contributions list and a user watchlist).

Phase III: MediaWiki
Despite the improvements from the PHP script and database back-end, the combination of increasing traffic, expensive features and limited hardware continued to cause performance issues on Wikipedia. In 2002, Lee Daniel Crocker rewrote the code again, calling the new software "Phase III". Because the site was experiencing frequent difficulties, Lee thought there "wasn't much time to sit down and properly architect and develop a solution", so he "just reorganized the existing architecture for better performance and hacked all the code". Profiling features were added to track down slow functions.

The Phase III software kept the same basic interface, and was designed to look and behave as much like the Phase II software as possible. A few new features were also added, like a new file upload system, side-by-side diffs of content changes, and interwiki links.

It was deployed to the English Wikipedia in July 2002, along with a hardware move to a new (but still single) server. Other features were added over 2002, like new maintenance special pages, or the "edit on double click" option. Performance issues quickly reappeared, though. For example, in November 2002, administrators had to temporarily disable the "view count" and "site" statistics, which were causing two database writes on every page view. They would also occasionally switch the site to read-only mode to maintain the service for readers, and disable expensive maintenance pages during high-access times because of table locking problems.

In early 2003, developers discussed whether they should properly re-engineer and re-architect the software from scratch, before the fire-fighting became unmanageable, or continue to tweak and improve the existing code base. They chose the latter solution, mostly because most developers were sufficiently happy with the code base, and confident enough that further iterative improvements would be enough to keep up with the growth of the site.

Around the same time, Brion Vibber effectively took over as lead developer and release manager of the software. The code is now maintained by a large and active group of developers.

In June 2003, administrators added a second server, the first database server separate from the web server. (The new machine was also the web server for non-English Wikipedia sites.) Load-balancing between the two servers would be set up later that year. Admins also enabled a new page caching system that used the filesystem to cache rendered, ready-to-output pages for anonymous users.

June 2003 is also when Jimmy Wales created the Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit to support Wikipedia and manage its infrastructure and day-to-day operations. The "Wikipedia software" was officially named "MediaWiki" in July, as wordplay by Daniel Mayer on the Wikimedia Foundation's name. What was thought at the time to be a clever pun would confuse generations of users and developers.

New features were added in July, like the automatically-generated table of contents, and the ability to edit page sections, both still in use today. The first release under the name "MediaWiki" happened in August 2003, concluding the long genesis of an application whose overall structure would remain fairly stable from there on.

There are no immediate plans for a Phase IV of the software. Instead, MediaWiki development now happens in smaller steps: see the.

Once reached phase III, the growth of MediaWiki exploded, thanks to many volunteer developers, who are the reason that MediaWiki exists. Some notable examples of what's been done by volunteer devs follow (including those devs whose volunteer work was so helpful that they were later hired to work on MediaWiki professionally).

MediaWiki software

 * Original MediaWiki software: Magnus Manske, Lee Daniel Crocker
 * Wiki tables: Magnus Manske
 * Namespaces: ?
 * Templates: Tim Starling (MW 1.2)
 * Template and MediaWiki namespace: Erik Möller and Tim Starling (MW 1.3)
 * MonoBook skin: Gabriel Wicke, with a design document and a mass of user comments (MW 1.3)
 * Categories: ? (MW 1.4)

Reading

 * The table of contents – Erik Möller

Editing

 * Section editing – Erik Möller
 * Watchlist: ?


 * Regular/daily updates from – Nikerabbit, Siebrand and since 2007 Raymond (including the LocalisationUpdate extension)
 * Committing or enabling all sorts of l10n – Nikerabbit, Brion Vibber, Rob Church, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Rotem Liss, Hashar
 * Other l10n/i18n – Huji, Collinj, JeLuF, Reedy, Simetrical, IAlex

Multimedia

 * MediaWiki core uploading infrastructure – Bryan
 * VipsScaler – Bryan


 * Original author 2005–2006 – Yurik
 * Maintainer 2008?–2013? – Catrope
 * Others – Bryan, IAlex, Reedy
 * Current maintainer – Anomie

Wikisource tools

 * Wikisource:WSexport – Tpt
 * ProofreadPage - ThomasV (creator) and Tpt (current maintainer)

Other extensions
Some of the MediaWiki extensions used on WMF wikis originally created and/or currently maintained by volunteers:



And many widely used extensions for non-Wikimedia wikis, like:
 * Most of Semantic MediaWiki – many contributors
 * ConfirmEdit's most used and useful module, QuestyCaptcha – Emufarmers
 * ConfirmAccount