Printer Friendly Version

If it's robust enough for the world's biggest wiki -- the online encyclopedia Wikipedia -- it'll probably work for your company.

That type of wiki popularity won the day for MediaWiki, which took Intranet Journal's Best Wiki Software trophy in our first annual Product of the Year contest. Readers embraced this simple, fully-featured, and highly scalable product. And you can't beat the price -- MediaWiki is open source and free.

To learn more about MediaWiki and its parent organization, the WikiMedia Foundation, we spoke with Brion Vibber, the foundation's lead developer. Wikipedia started in 2001, and the non-profit WikiMedia Foundation has the job of keeping it up and running. At the time of launch, the site ran off UseMod Wiki, a Perl-based, single-script wiki.

After a year, Wikipedia outgrew it, with the site's high number of pages and edits, so the in-house team started creating their own software. For six months, the site ran off new code written in PHP. After a major rewrite, that software became today's MediaWiki, which has been gradually evolving ever since.

More From Intranet Journal

Intranet Dashboard Takes Two Product of the Year Awards Lotusphere Gets Social, Gets a Life The Dark Side of Blogging If you want to comment on these or any other articles you see on Intranet Journal, we'd like to hear from you in our IT Management Forum. Thanks for reading. - Tom Dunlap, Managing Editor. FREE IT Management Newsletters bITa Planet CIO Update Intranet Journal Update Datamation IT Management Careers Datamation IT Management Update Grid Computing Planet HTML E-Security Planet Text E-Security Planet HTML DRM Watch HTML

The foundation, based in St. Petersburg, Florida, is surprisingly small, considering the global reach of Wikipedia. The tech staff consists of two programmers, a network manager, and two part-time equipment techs. Add in a few people for office staff and that's the whole organization. But that doesn't take in the legion of volunteers who dedicate their time to improving Wikipedia.

The foundation has always offered the wiki source code for free, so that anyone who cares to can grab a copy. In 2003, it started packaging the software in periodic releases, so that getting it became easier. It also cleaned out the Wikipedia mentions. Now, Vibber releases updated versions quarterly.

o The MediaWiki software has always been open source, using a General Public License. It's free to use, but anyone who modifies the software has to provide their changes if asked.

"It's certainly exciting," Vibber says of the Intranet Journal Product of the Year win. "We know that we're used in the internal space, but we don't see it much, so it's exciting to get recognition."

Vibber doesn't know how many companies use MediaWiki, since the foundation doesn't sell copies and doesn't provide tech support, but he estimates it to be in the thousands. It's common for him to meet new users at conferences and trade shows, he says, who approach him and tell him about their experiences with MediaWiki.

Scalability and security are paramount in his concerns when improving MediaWiki for Wikipedia, and he thinks those qualities appeal to corporate users. If the software is the backbone of the world's biggest wiki, people can see that it's robust enough to handle anything. Plus, they can see that development of the software isn't going to be abandoned, as the site is flourishing.

The Makers of virtual world Second Life, Linden Lab, use MediaWiki both internally and externally, says Rob Lanphier, a community and open source coordinator for Linden Lab. He sites the product's "ease of setup" and "comfort in knowing that it's the de facto standard" as reasons it's so appealing.

It's an outstanding product, but why are so many volunteers around the world devoted to improving it?

"It's like a lot of open source systems, people are attracted to the idealism of it," Vibber says. "Plus, working on open source software is an educational experience if you want to get into software development."

Working on Wikipedia has its own unique rewards. "You can have a great time researching or fixing grammar errors," Vibber adds. "People like all kinds of strange things."

Printer Friendly Version