MediaWiki is the FREE collaborative editing software that runs Wikipedia. Requires PHP 5
Software Santa's Note: This is BEST Used for Schools or Organizations that have an Intranet or a Web Server with PHP available to them. If you wish to install it on a single computer - and run it "locally" from the Web Browser of Choice on that one computer - you must go get and install XAMPP on that computer first.. But you can make your OWN WikiPedia![/b]
What MediaWiki is...
MediaWiki is wiki software.
If you don't know what a wiki is, then please read this Wikipedia article before going any further!
MediaWiki is server software.
As with any software that you expose to the internet, there may be bugs or security problems. Do not install MediaWiki unless you intend to keep up with security upgrades (please subscribe to receive announcements of security updates).
MediaWiki is geared towards the needs of the Wikimedia projects.
The program was primarily developed to run on a large server farm for Wikipedia and its sister projects. Features, performance, configurability, ease-of-use, etc are often designed in this light; if your needs are radically different the software might not be appropriate for you.
MediaWiki is free software.
No guarantee or warranty of any kind is provided.
Try out Wikitext
Yes, you can easily modify pages and you can (temporarily) publish dummy sentences, and you can even (temporarily) completely destroy a page in a wiki. You don't need to have any programming skills to do this.
We suggest you exercise yourself within our sandbox. Please isolate your testing there, though: the admins might not take too kindly to your mischief otherwise.
You can also look up the cheat sheet which contains basic formatting commands.
Some things MediaWiki doesn't do so well...
Because MediaWiki was designed for open-content, it is often not suitable for situations where you want to restrict access to part of the wiki.
MediaWiki has been designed to serve very high-traffic websites such as Wikipedia. It has been optimized for this use and may not be so suitable for smaller sites, where disk space or memory are bigger restrictions than bandwidth.
MediaWiki is not normally a suitable replacement for dedicated forum/blogging software if that is what you are after.
In the above cases there may be other wiki software (or non-wiki software) which better serves your needs.
See also
Manual:Deciding whether to use a wiki as your website type
Manual:Deciding which wiki software to use
Full list of MediaWiki features and Principles
wikipedia:Comparison of wiki software
www.wikimatrix.org — side-by-side comparison of various wiki engines.
Download MediaWiki 1.23.6
This is a .tar.gz file. If you are on Windows, you can use 7-Zip to decompress it.
Release notes
Installing / Upgrading / Configuration
Note: the last stable release doesn't contain all bug fixes to the stable branch: you can try its last snapshot, but almost surely not all the fixes for the known bugs in the stable release have yet been included in such snapshot.
License
MediaWiki is free software licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. Because MediaWiki is licensed free of charge, there is no warranty, to the extent permitted by applicable law. Read the full text of the GNU GPL version 2 for details.
System Requirements
MediaWiki requires PHP 5.3.2+ and either MySQL 5.0.2+ or one of the other three possible stores. For more information, please read the pages on system requirements and compatibility.
Attention
To MediaWiki ≤ 1.18.x, 1.20.x and 1.21.x users: Support of these branches was discontinued. Please update to a newer version of MediaWiki:
MediaWiki 1.23.6 (download) - stable LTS
MediaWiki 1.22.13 (download) - legacy
MediaWiki 1.19.21 (download) - legacy LTS
Other downloads
MediaWiki 1.23.6 GPG security signature to verify your download with GNU Privacy Guard
GPG keys
MediaWiki 1.23.6 changes not including i18n (unified diff)
Active MediaWiki developers should instead download from Git to get the latest version of the MediaWiki software. The git repository has earlier versions of the software, so it is possible to switch to ("check out") a particular release.
Note
MySQL 5 support is required since MediaWiki 1.19 – if you are using an older version of MySQL and cannot upgrade, you can use MediaWiki 1.18.6 (download). Note that this version is no longer supported.
Alternatives to manual installation
Some users may prefer to skip manual installation by using a pre-integrated MediaWiki software appliance or hosting services; repositories of some distros also increasingly offer packages for MediaWiki, with different degrees of frequency and extensions coverage (e.g. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo).
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki