MediaWiki timeline
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This page focuses on the evolution of the MediaWiki software as it relates to Wikipedia and other Wikimedia sites. For more general information, see mw:MediaWiki history.
{{Timeline item/MediaWiki
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| Topic | Date | Event | Sources | Notes |
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| MediaWiki | 2001-01-15 | Wikipedia launches, powered by UseModWiki, an existing GPL wiki engine written by Clifford Adams in Perl, using CamelCase and storing all pages in individual text files with no history of changes made.
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| MediaWiki | 2001-01 | After it appeared that CamelCase isn't really appropriate to name encyclopedia articles, UseModWiki developer and Wikipedia participant Clifford Adams adds a new feature to UseModWiki: free links, e.g. the ability to link to pages with a special syntax (double square brackets), instead of automatic CamelCase linking
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| MediaWiki | 2001-03 | Wikipedia upgrades to the new version of UseModWiki supporting free links, and enables them.
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| MediaWiki | 2001 | (Summer) Wikipedia participant Magnus Manske (then a university student) starts to work on a dedicated Wikipedia wiki engine in his free time. He aims to improve Wikipedia's performance using a database-driven app, and to be able to develop Wikipedia-specific features that can't be provided by a "generic" wiki engine. Written in PHP and MySQL-backed, the new engine is simply called the "PHP script", "PHP wiki", "Wikipedia software" or "phase II".
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| MediaWiki | 2001-09 | The "PHP script" is shared on SourceForge. (Now a dead link; see the “phpwiki” module at http://wikipedia.cvs.sourceforge.net/.)
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| MediaWiki | 2002-01-25 | As Wikipedia suffers from recurring performance issues because of increasing traffic, the English language Wikipedia eventually switches from UseModWiki to the PHP script. An automated program, called "User:Conversion script", converts the last version of the existing articles to the phase II format. The PHP script introduces many critical features still in use today, like namespaces to organize content (including talk pages), skins, and special pages (including maintenance reports, a contributions list and a user watchlist).
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| MediaWiki | 2002 | Lee Daniel Crocker rewrites the code again, calling the new software "Phase III".
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"Despite the improvements from the PHP script and database back-end, the combination of increasing traffic, expensive features and limited hardware continued to cause performance issues on Wikipedia. Because the site was experiencing frequent difficulties, Lee thought there "wasn't much time to sit down and properly architect and develop a solution", so he "just reorganized the existing architecture for better performance and hacked all the code". Profiling features were added to track down slow functions. The Phase III software kept the same basic interface, and was designed to look and behave as much like the Phase II software as possible. A few new features were also added, like a new file upload system, side-by-side diffs of content changes, and interwiki links." (MediaWiki history).
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| MediaWiki | 2002 | Bots
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| MediaWiki | 2002-07 | The Phase III software is deployed to the English Wikipedia in July 2002, along with a hardware move to a new (but still single) server.
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| MediaWiki | 2002-09 | Brion Vibber partly restores previous revisions of the UseModWiki history on the English Wikipedia.
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| MediaWiki | 2002-10 | The random page bugs causes everyone to land on unexpected pages.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-01 | Developers discuss whether they should properly re-engineer and re-architect the software from scratch, before the fire-fighting became unmanageable, or continue to tweak and improve the existing code base. They choose the latter solution, mostly because most developers are sufficiently happy with the code base, and confident enough that further iterative improvements will be enough to keep up with the growth of the site.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-01 | Wikipedia3 and Wikipedia4 discussions begin, timelines proposed
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| MediaWiki | 2003-01 | Support for mathematical formulas in TeX is added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
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| MediaWiki | 2003 | Brion Vibber takes over as lead developer and release manager of the software.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-06-09 | ISBNs in articles now link to Special:Booksources, which fetches its contents from the user-editable page Wikipedia:Book sources. Before this, ISBN link targets were coded into the software.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-07 | The "Wikipedia software" is officially named "MediaWiki", a wordplay by Daniel Mayer on the Wikimedia Foundation's name.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-07 | New features are added, like the automatically-generated table of contents, and the ability to edit page sections.
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| MediaWiki | 2003-08 | First release of the Wikipedia software under the name "MediaWiki".
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| MediaWiki | 2003-12-06 | various system messages shown to Wikipedia users are no longer hard coded, allowing Wikipedia administrators to modify certain parts of MediaWiki's interface,
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| MediaWiki | 2004-05-29 | All the various websites were updated to a new version of the MediaWiki software, called MediaWiki 1.3, bringing features such as classification through categories, and transclusion of standard texts through templates.
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| MediaWiki | 2005-06-27 | MediaWiki 1.5 and "big schema change"
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| MediaWiki | 2005-11 | CheckUser tool (and associated policy)
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| MediaWiki | 2005-12-22 | Semi-protection
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| MediaWiki | 2006-05 | Oversight
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| MediaWiki | 2010-05-13 | Vector and associated features default launch.
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| MediaWiki | 2004-06-03 | administrators can edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css.
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| MediaWiki | 2008-12-03 | The Wikimedia Foundation announces a grant from the Stanton Foundation to improve usability.
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| MediaWiki | 2009-07-01 | The Wikimedia Foundation receives a grant from the Ford Foundation to improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons.
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| MediaWiki |