MediaWiki is a collaboration and documentation platform brought to you by a vibrant community and anyone who shares Wikimedia’s vision to collect and share knowledge that fully represents human diversity is very much welcome to participate in the community.

Differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki

You probably know Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, and may possibly be a little bit confused by similar, but different, words such as Wiki, Wikimedia or MediaWiki.

Wiki

A wiki is a type of website whose contents can be edited from the web browser, and which keeps a version history for each editable page. Wikis are often, but not always, editable by any visitor to the site.

Wikimedia

Wikimedia is the collective name for the Wikimedia movement, revolving around a group of inter-related projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiquote and others, which aim to use the collaborative power of the Internet, and the wiki concept, to create and share free knowledge of all kinds

Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a Wikimedia project that is a global, free and multilingual internet encyclopedia. It is the oldest and largest Wikimedia project, predating the Wikimedia Foundation itself. Wikipedia is often described as a wiki, but it is in fact a collection of over 200 wikis, one for each language, all running on the MediaWiki software.

Now that we have cleared the air on the difference between these concepts, let’s get back to the project I’m currently working on which is Mediawiki

What problem is your community trying to solve?

The MediaWiki action API is a web service that allows access to some wiki-features like authentication, page operations, and search. It can provide meta information about the wiki and the logged-in user. Several Wikimedia projects make use of this API.

As of now, there are 128 pages on the Action API on MediaWiki.org. A little research was done on the state of the docs and a few problems and recommendations documented for next steps. One of the issues chosen to address was inconsistency. For example, some pages had the automated API docs embedded; some didn’t, some pages had code samples, some didn’t, etc.

As a first step, a documentation template was designed and used to re-write the top 20 viewed pages of the API. But then, to improve all 128 pages, it was made open to new Wikimedia contributors for help :-) The next 60 pages were improved in the last two Outreachy rounds.

The goal of this project is to improve documentation of ~20 top 100 most viewed MediaWiki Action API pages on-wiki using the documentation template.

How does Mediawiki fit into the larger community?

The MediaWiki software is used by tens of thousands of websites and thousands of companies and organizations. It powers Wikipedia and helps collect and organize knowledge and make it available to people. It’s powerful, multilingual, free and open for others to use (and improve), extensible, customizable, reliable, and free of charge.

The site, mediawiki.org, is intended for information about MediaWiki and related software.

Besides Wikimedia sister projects, many other sites exist that are using MediaWiki engine. Such sites based on Mediawiki software generally display the Powered by icon near the bottom right corner of their pages. Some examples include AIDS Wiki, Apple 2 Games, Bitcoin Wiki, Bible Strength and many more.

Why would people want to use your project?

MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that uses PHP to process and display data stored in a database, such as MySQL. Pages use MediaWiki’s wikitext format, so that users without knowledge of HTML or CSS can edit them easily. When a user submits an edit to a page, MediaWiki writes it to the database, but without deleting the previous versions of the page, thus allowing easy reverts in case of vandalism or spamming. MediaWiki can manage image and multimedia files, too, which are stored in the filesystem. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with proxy server software. With dedicated extensions, MediaWiki can also handle structured data.

What makes you most excited to work on your project?

The fact that while improving the documentation to MediaWiki Action API pages in my cubicle, I am also improving the experience of thousands of developers who utilize Mediawiki’s API and also having the opportunity to collaborate with the great minds behind the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and improve my skills while doing so.

What new terms or concepts have you learned in the past month?

I’ve learned Wiki editing, using mediawiki templates, creating and managing translatable pages and also how to use the Wikimedia Phabricator tool.

What was confusing to you about the project?

Well I’ll say at first creating and managing translatable pages and adding translation tags to my sandbox pages before pushing to the main page was quite confusing but with the help of my mentor and going through resources on translating pages, I am well past that confusion now.

My journey and experience so far with this wonderful community has been an exciting one and I’m ecstatic about the opportunity to learn and collaborate and also experiences that still awaits me.