History
When Wikipedia was first launched in January 2001, it ran on the existing wiki software UseModWiki, which was written in Perl and stored all wiki pages in text files. This software soon proved limiting, both in its functionality and its performance. In mid-2001, Magnus Manske, a developer and student at the University of Cologne, who was also a Wikipedia editor, began working on new software that would replace UseModWiki, specifically for use by Wikipedia. This software was written in PHP and stored all its information in a MySQL database. It launched on the English Wikipedia in January 2002, and was gradually deployed on all the Wikipedia language sites of that time. This software was referred to as "the PHP script" and as "phase II", with the name "phase I" retroactively given to the use of UseModWiki.
Increasing usage soon caused load problems again, and soon afterward, another rewrite of the software began, done by Lee Daniel Crocker, which was first known as "phase III". This new software was also written in PHP with a MySQL backend, and kept the basic interface of the phase II software, but was meant to be more scalable. It went live on Wikipedia in July 2002.
The Wikimedia Foundation was announced on June 20, 2003, and in July, Wikipedia contributor Daniel Mayer suggested the name "MediaWiki" for the software, as a play on "Wikimedia". The name was gradually phased in beginning in August 2003. The name has frequently caused confusion due to its (intentional) similarity to the "Wikimedia" name (which itself is similar to "Wikipedia").
The product logo was created by Erik Möller using a flower photograph taken by Florence Nibart-Devouard, and was originally submitted to an international logo contest for a new Wikipedia logo held in mid-2003. The logo came in third place, and was chosen to represent MediaWiki instead of Wikipedia, with the second place logo used for the Wikimedia Foundation. The double square brackets around the photo of a sunflower symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages.
Later, Brion Vibber, the Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, took up the role of release manager and most active developer.
Major milestones in MediaWiki's development have included the categorization system, added in 2004; parser functions, added in 2006; and flagged revisions, added in 2008.
Read more about this topic: MediaWiki
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