2004-08-12

MediaWiki
---------

MediaWiki is the software used for Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org) and the
other Wikimedia Foundation websites. Compared to other wikis, it has an
excellent range of features and support for high-traffic websites (Wikipedia
peaks at 380 requests per second as of August 2004). However, it is generally
harder to install. Be sure to follow the INSTALL document closely.

Installation on a Microsoft Windows system is not recommended, however it is
possible. Documentation for installation on Windows may be found at:

  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_MediaWiki_on_Windows


The MediaWiki software was written by:
 * Lee Daniel Crocker
 * Magnus Manske
 * Jan Hidders
 * Brion Vibber
 * Axel Boldt
 * Geoffrey T. Dairiki
 * Tomasz Wegrzanowski
 * Erik Moeller
 * Tim Starling
 * Gabriel Wicke
 * Several others

These developers hold the copyright to this work, and it is licensed under the
terms of the GNU General Public License, version 2 (see
http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl.html). Derivative works and later versions of
the code will also be considered free software licensed under the same terms.

The newly-founded Wikimedia Foundation currently has no legal rights to the
software, although copyright may be assigned to it at a later date. Wikimedia
has not funded any of the development work.

Sections of code written exclusively by Lee Crocker or Erik Moeller are also
released into the public domain, which does not impair the obligations of users
under the GPL for use of the whole code or other sections thereof.

Many thanks to the Wikipedia regulars for testing and suggestions.

The code is currently maintained at Sourceforge under the project "wikipedia",
module name "phase3". You can view the code in CVS there:

  http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net

Please report bugs and make feature requests in our BugZilla system:

  http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org

Documentation and discussion on new features may be found at:

  http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_User%27s_Guide
  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_development
  
If you are setting up your own wiki based on this software, it is highly
recommended that you subscribe to mediawiki-l:

  http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l

The mailing list is very low volume, and is intended primarily for
announcements of new versions, bug fixes, and security issues.


PHP

The code is written in PHP. Version 4.3.2 or higher is recommended. There are
known issues with early 4.2.x releases. Also, the Monobook skin currently does
not work under the new PHP 5 (but you can use one of the older skins).

MySQL

MediaWiki requires MySQL 3.23 or later, and PHP-MySQL. Version 4.0 or later is
strongly recommended.

Operating system

The code was written on and for Linux, and no attempt has been made to make it
portable to other OSs. The math support in particular has run-time dependencies
on things like TeTeX and GhostScript that are generally found in Linux but not
other OSs. However, we have had reports of successful installation on Windows,
albeit without TeX support.