MediaWiki is afree server-based wiki software, licensed under theGNU General Public License (GPL). It's designed to serve a website that gets millions of hits per day.
You probably knowWikipedia, the free encyclopedia.MediaWiki is the software on which Wikipedia is built.
The words "wiki", "Wikimedia", and "MediaWiki" have caused some confusion.
To learn more about these words, read "Differences between Wikipedia, Wikimedia, MediaWiki, and wiki" where this is explained.
MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation that usesPHP to process and display data stored in a database, such asMySQL.
Pages use MediaWiki'swikitext format, so that users without knowledge ofHTML orCSS 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 file system. For large wikis with lots of users, MediaWiki supports caching and can be easily coupled with proxy server software.With dedicated extensions, MediaWiki can alsohandle structured data.
Yes, you can easily modify pages, and you can (temporarily) publish dummy sentences, and you can even (temporarily) completely destroy a page in a wiki. You don't need to have any programming skills to do this.
We suggest you exercise yourself within oursandbox. Please isolate your testing there, though: theadmins might not take too kindly to your mischief otherwise.
You can also look up thecheat sheet, which contains basic formatting commands.
In the above cases, there may be other wiki software (or non-wiki software) better suited to your needs.
