YK: History of MediaWiki
The history of MediaWiki starts with Wikipedia, and the history of Wikipedia starts with wikis, so we’ll begin there. In 1995 Ward Cunningham, a programmer who was already known for his work in defining software design patterns, created the first wiki, on his company’s website, c2.com. It was a very simple website, with one bizarre-at-the-time feature: every page had an "edit" link, where random visitors to the website could modify its contents. The wiki was meant to hold information about design patterns, as part of a section on the website called the "Portland Pattern Repository". Cunningham was inspired by HyperCard, an Apple application from the 1980s that stored information on editable "cards" that could link to one another; he wanted to create something similar for the then-new World Wide Web. For the name of this concept, Cunningham originally thought of "QuickWeb", but then remembered the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle", an airport shuttle he had taken in Honolulu, Hawaii, and decided to call his new idea "WikiWikiWeb". "Wiki” or “wiki wiki" means "fast" or “hurry up” in Hawaiian; and in fact it apparently derives from the English word "quickly", so its new presence in English is somewhat of a return.
"WikiWikiWeb" for a while referred to four things: the website hosted on c2.com, the software used to run it (written in Perl), and later any user-editable website (what is now known as a wiki), and any application used to run such a site (now known as wiki software). There was no great distinction for the first five years or so between the code used to run a wiki and the content on it, partly because there was nearly a 1:1 correspondence between the two: many of the original wiki administrators were programmers, and they tended to create their own new, or modified, version of the software to run their own wikis.
In 2000, Jimmy Wales, an internet entrepreneur living in Florida, decided to create Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia that would compete with the various subscription-only encyclopedias like Encyclopedia Britannica. He hired Larry Sanger to edit it. Like traditional encyclopedias, each article was written by an expert on the subject matter. Nupedia was a failure, managing to get all of 12 fully-finished articles in its first year. While the two were thinking about how to increase contributions, Sanger heard from a friend of his about wikis, and suggested the idea to Wales for use as a way to supplement Nupedia’s content. Wales, though skeptical at first, put up a wiki. Sanger suggested that it be called "Wikipedia", and Wales agreed, obtaining the domain names "wikipedia.com" and "wikipedia.org". On January 15, 2001, Wikipedia was launched at wikipedia.com. Though interest was low at the beginning, it started to increase exponentially, and Nupedia was soon forgotten. Several months later, the first subdomains for non-English languages were created; the first was "deutsche.wikipedia.com" in March 2001. In August 2002, the content was transferred to wikipedia.org, reflecting Wales’ new view of Wikipedia as a non-profit public resource, instead of the side-project of a for-profit website.
Wales and Sanger later had a falling-out over philosophical differences, and now Sanger has become one of Wikipedia’s most vocal critics. That fascinating turn of events is a subject for another book; but in any case, the path was in place for Wikipedia to achieve its meteoric rise in popularity. It soon fundamentally altered the course of wikis, and later it would fundamentally alter the world as well.
The software that Wales and Sanger originally ran Wikipedia on was UseModWiki, a Perl application written by Clifford Adams. UseModWiki, like most wiki software at the time, was the work of tinkerers: it was based on AtisWiki, which was based on CvWiki, which in turn was based on WikiWikiWeb, Cunningham’s original application. And again like most wiki software of the time, UseModWiki used flat text files to store all page revisions. That approach was slow, and, given Wikipedia’s constant growth, was proving unworkable. Wikipedia also needed functionality that UseModWiki didn’t provide, so in late 2001 Wales hired Magnus Manske, a German programmer and active Nupedia contributor, to rewrite the software in PHP, now storing edits in a MySQL database. In January 2002, Wikipedia switched over to this new (unnamed) software. This new software had performance problems of its own, though. Programmer Lee Daniel Crocker started working on a newer version of the software, and in July 2002 Wikipedia switched to that software. Crocker’s code was now known as "phase III", with UseModWiki and Manske’s code retroactively referred to as "phase I" and "phase II", respectively.
A year later, in June 2003, Wales created the Wikimedia Foundation, also known as the WMF, to manage Wikipedia and its growing number of sister sites, like Wiktionary. The name "Wikimedia" was based on "Wikipedia", and had been suggested by Sheldon Rampton on a Wikipedia mailing list in March. The next month, Wikipedia enthusiast Daniel Mayer, writing on that same mailing list, suggested a name for Crocker’s "phase III" software: "MediaWiki", a play on "Wikimedia". The name stuck, and was quickly made official.
MediaWiki has been used by all Wikimedia websites since 2004.
Almost since the beginning of MediaWiki’s existence, it started getting heavily used on non-Wikimedia sites as well. Two of the non-Wikimedia sites that launched in 2003, that ran on MediaWiki software, remain among the largest wikis today: Wikitravel, a travel guide (though its growth has been curtailed by the WMF’s own travel site, Wikivoyage), and Memory Alpha, the main Star Trek wiki. In the years since, there have been tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of wikis launched using MediaWiki software.
By now, most early wiki software, like WikiWikiWeb, UseModWiki etc., is no longer in widespread use, but there are certainly wiki applications other than MediaWiki that are still in regular use and under development. Interestingly, nearly all of the wiki applications in widespread use today were originally created between 2002 and 2006. They include, besides MediaWiki, the open-source applications PmWiki, Tiki and TWiki (an exception, since it was started in 1998), and the proprietary applications Confluence and Socialtext. There are also various content-management systems that include some limited wiki functionality; these include Jive and Microsoft SharePoint.
The first released version of MediaWiki was 1.1, and the current version, at the time of this writing, is 1.22. We won’t get into the changes that happened in each version here, though suffice it to say that there have been a lot; virtually the entire codebase has been rewritten, in some cases several times. You can see the full version history for MediaWiki at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_version_history
During the over ten years that MediaWiki has existed, it has had contributions from hundreds of developers, translators and testers, along with a handful of usability experts, graphic designers, project managers, etc. It would be difficult to list here all of the people who have made significant contributions to MediaWiki, or even invaluable contributions. Two names stand out, though, for the scope of their involvement. The first is Brion Vibber, who is currently the Lead Software Architect for the Wikimedia Foundation, and who has essentially had that role in MediaWiki since nearly the beginning, adding enormous amounts of code and serving as the final word on what gets into the software and onto Wikimedia sites.
The second name is Tim Starling, who serves as the WMF’s Lead Platform Architect, and who like Brion has been involved in development since nearly the beginning, has contributed a huge amount of code, and has had significant influence on the current state of the software.
