Wikipedia.org
is a free encyclopedia on the internet. Anyone can create, edit, delete
and view the information on the site. The are no paid professionals
managing the encyclopedia. This is truly democratic knowledge repository
that believes in the power of the community.
Media Wiki is
the particular Wiki engine developed for and used by Wikipedia and the
other Wiki Media projects. Media Wiki is licensed under the GPL (General
Public License) it is freely available for anyone. It is a feature-rich
Wiki implementation, written primarily for Wikipedia and other Wikimedia
foundation projects, but is also used by many other Wiki’s. It is written
in PHP and MySQL.
MediaWiki was
originally developed by Magnus Manske a German student and developer. The
Wikipedia site was previously powered by UseModWiki which used Perl. Then
they switchover to PHP was made with a new version. After that software
was further rewritten and improved and has been incrementally developed
from this code base since. Recently MediaWiki stable version released.
The Wikipedia
movement started as a result of the enterprising spirit and vision of a
wealthy options trader named Jimmy”Jing” wales. He wanted to build
a free encyclopedia on the Net and hired a Phd Scholar, Larry Sanger,
to bring out what was named Nupedia. Inspite of their Herculean
efforts, Nupedia put up only 12 articles after 18 months of efforts, and a
bill of $25,000. One of Wales’ employees suggested the
Wiki Software, and soon the Wiki version of the encyclopedia became a
runaway success, within one year, they had 18,000 articles on the Net and
by September 2004 the tally had crossed the 1 million mark. According to
time magazine Wales has spent around $500,000 on his Wiki Project till
date. Interestingly enough, the free software foundation has started
working on a free encyclopedia GNUpedia, but they merged it with WikiPedia
when media wiki went for a GPL.
Wales is currently the
president of the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization which
funds and manages MediaWiki projects. It relies on public donations and is
dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free,
multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these
Wiki-based projects to the public, free of charge. The Wikimedia Board of
Trustees manages the activities of the foundation, including the financial
budgets for computer equipment and human resources.
