2003-11-08

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. 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
* Several others

These developers hold the copyright to this work, and it is
licensed 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 are also
released into the public domain, wich 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, report bugs and make feature requests there:

  http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net

Documentation and discussion on new features may be found
at:

  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. 

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.