What MediaWiki powers
MediaWiki was created by the Wikimedia Foundation to run Wikipedia, the world’s largest online encyclopedia. Today it powers:- Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects — Handling hundreds of millions of readers per month across dozens of language editions
- Enterprise wikis — Organizations use MediaWiki for internal knowledge bases, technical documentation, and collaborative editing
- Community wikis — Fan sites, open-source project wikis, and public reference sites across virtually every subject domain
- Government and academic sites — Universities, research institutions, and public agencies rely on MediaWiki for public documentation
Key capabilities
Extensibility
MediaWiki is feature-rich and extensible, both through on-wiki customization and through hundreds of community-built extensions. The hook system and extension registration API allow third-party code to integrate deeply with core functionality without modifying core files.
Scalability
MediaWiki is suitable for both small personal wikis and massive installations serving hundreds of millions of users. Its architecture supports read replicas, distributed caching (Memcached, Redis), job queues, and CDN integration.
Localization
With support for over 350 languages, MediaWiki includes a mature localization system covering right-to-left scripts, Unicode normalization, plural rules, and language-specific number and date formatting via the CLDR plural rule parser (
wikimedia/cldr-plural-rule-parser).Open standards
MediaWiki exposes content through multiple interfaces: a traditional web UI, a JSON Action API (
api.php), a RESTful REST API (rest.php), and a ResourceLoader asset pipeline (load.php). All content is licensed and exportable.CREDITS file in the source tree lists hundreds of technical contributors to the project.
Who should read this documentation
This documentation targets developers and technical administrators working with MediaWiki at the code level. It is organized around four primary audiences:- Extension developers
- API integrators
- Skin developers
- System administrators
If you are building a MediaWiki extension — adding special pages, API modules, parser functions, or new content types — start with the Architecture Overview to understand the hook system and service container, then move to the extension development guides.Key concepts:
- Hook system and
HookContainer/HookRunner ExtensionRegistryandextension.jsonMediaWikiServicesdependency injection- Parser and content handler APIs
Major sections
Quickstart
Get MediaWiki running locally in minutes using either Docker or the PHP built-in server with a SQLite database.
Architecture overview
Understand the request lifecycle, service container, hook system, and major subsystems like the Parser, ResourceLoader, and JobQueue.
API reference
Browse the Action API and REST API endpoints available for integrating with MediaWiki programmatically.
Extension development
Build extensions using hooks, services, and the extension registry.
License and community
MediaWiki is free software released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. The project uses the following channels for community communication:| Channel | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Wikimedia Phabricator | Bug reports and feature requests |
| mediawiki-announce | Low-traffic release announcements |
| mediawiki-l | Site admin support mailing list |
| wikitech-l | Developer discussion mailing list |
#mediawiki on Libera.Chat | Real-time IRC chat |