MediaWiki timeline

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This page is being rewritten, expanded and reorganized as part of the Wikimedia history project.

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. 

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Topic Date Event Sources Notes
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.
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
MediaWiki 2001-03
Wikipedia upgrades to the new version of UseModWiki supporting free links, and enables them.
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".
MediaWiki 2001-09
The "PHP script" is shared on SourceForge. (Now a dead link; see the “phpwiki” module at http://wikipedia.cvs.sourceforge.net/.)
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).
MediaWiki 2002
Lee Daniel Crocker rewrites the code again, calling the new software "Phase III".
"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).
MediaWiki 2002
Bots
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.
MediaWiki 2002-09
Brion Vibber partly restores previous revisions of the UseModWiki history on the English Wikipedia.
MediaWiki 2002-10
The random page bugs causes everyone to land on unexpected pages.
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.
MediaWiki 2003-01
Wikipedia3 and Wikipedia4 discussions begin, timelines proposed
MediaWiki 2003-01
Support for mathematical formulas in TeX is added. The code was contributed by Tomasz Wegrzanowski.
MediaWiki 2003
Brion Vibber takes over as lead developer and release manager of the software.
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.
MediaWiki 2003-07
The "Wikipedia software" is officially named "MediaWiki", a wordplay by Daniel Mayer on the Wikimedia Foundation's name.
MediaWiki 2003-07
New features are added, like the automatically-generated table of contents, and the ability to edit page sections.
MediaWiki 2003-08
First release of the Wikipedia software under the name "MediaWiki".
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,
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.
MediaWiki 2005-06-27
MediaWiki 1.5 and "big schema change"
MediaWiki 2005-11
CheckUser tool (and associated policy)
MediaWiki 2005-12-22
Semi-protection
MediaWiki 2006-05
Oversight
MediaWiki 2010-05-13
Vector and associated features default launch.
MediaWiki 2004-06-03
administrators can edit the style of the interface by changing the CSS in the monobook stylesheet at MediaWiki:Monobook.css.
MediaWiki 2008-12-03
The Wikimedia Foundation announces a grant from the Stanton Foundation to improve usability.
MediaWiki 2009-07-01
The Wikimedia Foundation receives a grant from the Ford Foundation to improve the usability of Wikimedia Commons.
MediaWiki
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