66-568: SIMILE ( Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments ) was a joint research project run by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) , Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries and MIT CSAIL and funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation . The project ran from 2003 to August 2008. It focused on developing tools to increase the interoperability of disparate digital collections. Much of SIMILE's technical focus
132-420: A "user contributions" option on a sidebar. In a 2004 article, Carl Challborn and Teresa Reimann noted that "While this feature may be a slight deviation from the collaborative, 'ego-less' spirit of wiki purists, it can be very useful for educators who need to assess the contribution and participation of individual student users." MediaWiki provides many features beyond hyperlinks for structuring content. One of
198-457: A MediaWiki-based wiki found that when they were asked an open question about main problems with the wiki, 24% cited technical problems with formatting, e.g. "Couldn't figure out how to get an image in. Can't figure out how to show a link with words; it inserts a number." To make editing long pages easier, MediaWiki allows the editing of a subsection of a page (as identified by its header). A registered user can also indicate whether or not an edit
264-723: A community of major web players and publishers to establish a MediaWiki wiki that seeks to document open web standards called the WebPlatform and WebPlatform Docs. In January 2013, Beihang University became the Chinese host. In 2022 the W3C WebFonts Working Group won an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for standardizing font technology for custom downloadable fonts and typography for web and TV devices. On 1 January 2023, it reformed as
330-450: A continuous feed of Recent Changes to an IRC channel that these tools can monitor, eliminating their need to send requests for a refreshed Recent Changes feed to the API. Another important tool is watchlisting. Each logged-in user has a watchlist to which the user can add whatever pages he or she wishes. When an edit is made to one of those pages, a summary of that edit appears on the watchlist
396-530: A file called LocalSettings.php . Some aspects of MediaWiki can be configured through special pages or by editing certain pages; for instance, abuse filters can be configured through a special page, and certain gadgets can be added by creating JavaScript pages in the MediaWiki namespace. The MediaWiki community publishes a comprehensive installation guide. One of the earliest differences between MediaWiki (and its predecessor, UseModWiki ) and other wiki engines
462-505: A lesser degree, the Wikimedia Foundation's other projects. Fandom , a wiki hosting service formerly known as Wikia, runs on MediaWiki. Other public wikis that run on MediaWiki include wikiHow and SNPedia . WikiLeaks began as a MediaWiki-based site, but is no longer a wiki. A number of alternative wiki encyclopedias to Misplaced Pages run on MediaWiki, including Citizendium , Metapedia , Scholarpedia and Conservapedia . MediaWiki
528-585: A major concern for developers. Another major aspect of MediaWiki is its internationalization; its interface is available in more than 400 languages. The software has more than 1,000 configuration settings and more than 1,800 extensions available for enabling various features to be added or changed. MediaWiki is free and open-source and is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. Its documentation, located at its official website at www.mediawiki.org,
594-599: A new edition or level of the recommendation. Additionally, the W3C publishes various kinds of informative notes which are to be used as references. Unlike the Internet Society and other international standards bodies, the W3C does not have a certification program. The W3C has decided, for now, that it is not suitable to start such a program, owing to the risk of creating more drawbacks for the community than benefits. In January 2023, after 28 years of being jointly administered by
660-580: A new logo was initiated on June 22, 2020, as the old logo was a bitmap image and had "high details", leading to problems when rendering at high and low resolutions, respectively. After two rounds of voting, the new and current MediaWiki logo designed by Serhio Magpie was selected on October 24, 2020, and officially adopted on April 1, 2021. The first version of MediaWiki, 1.1, was released in December 2003. MediaWiki's most famous use has been in Misplaced Pages and, to
726-456: A public-interest 501(c)(3) non-profit organization . W3C develops technical specifications for HTML5 , CSS , SVG , WOFF , the Semantic Web stack , XML , and other technologies. Sometimes, when a specification becomes too large, it is split into independent modules that can mature at their own pace. Subsequent editions of a module or specification are known as levels and are denoted by
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#1732876143055792-576: A set of core principles and components that are chosen by the consortium. It was originally intended that CERN host the European branch of W3C; however, CERN wished to focus on particle physics , not information technology . In April 1995, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation became the European host of W3C, with Keio University Research Institute at SFC becoming
858-473: A wide variety of uploaded media files. Its richest functionality is in the area of images, where image galleries and thumbnails can be generated with relative ease. There is also support for Exif metadata . The use of MediaWiki to operate the Wikimedia Commons , one of the largest free content media archives, has driven the need for further functionality in this area. For WYSIWYG editing, VisualEditor
924-462: A working draft (WD) for review by the community. A WD document is the first form of a standard that is publicly available. Commentary by virtually anyone is accepted, though no promises are made with regard to action on any particular element commented upon. At this stage, the standard document may have significant differences from its final form. As such, anyone who implements WD standards should be ready to significantly modify their implementations as
990-502: Is also used for feature and enhancement requests. When Misplaced Pages was launched in January 2001, it ran on an existing wiki software system, UseModWiki . UseModWiki is written in the Perl programming language, and stores all wiki pages in text ( .txt ) files. This software soon proved to be limiting, in both functionality and performance. In mid-2001, Magnus Manske —a developer and student at
1056-765: Is also used internally by a large number of companies, including Novell and Intel . Notable usages of MediaWiki within governments include Intellipedia , used by the United States Intelligence Community , Diplopedia , used by the United States Department of State , and milWiki, a part of milSuite used by the United States Department of Defense . United Nations agencies such as the United Nations Development Programme and INSTRAW chose to implement their wikis using MediaWiki, because "this software runs Misplaced Pages and
1122-400: Is available to use in MediaWiki which simplifying editing process for editors and has been bundled since MediaWiki 1.35. Other extensions exist for handling WYSIWYG editing to different degrees. Among the features of MediaWiki to assist in tracking edits is a Recent Changes feature that provides a list of recent edits to the wiki. This list contains basic information about those edits such as
1188-403: Is done by external experts in the W3C's various working groups. The Consortium is governed by its membership. The list of members is available to the public. Members include businesses, nonprofit organizations, universities, governmental entities, and individuals. Membership requirements are transparent except for one requirement: An application for membership must be reviewed and approved by
1254-422: Is largely incompatible with MediaWiki. Cloud hosting can eliminate the need to deploy a new server. An installation PHP script is accessed via a web browser to initialize the wiki's settings. It prompts the user for a minimal set of required parameters, leaving further changes, such as enabling uploads, adding a site logo, and installing extensions, to be made by modifying configuration settings contained in
1320-405: Is minor. Correcting spelling, grammar or punctuation are examples of minor edits, whereas adding paragraphs of new text is an example of a non-minor edit. Sometimes while one user is editing, a second user saves an edit to the same part of the page. Then, when the first user attempts to save the page, an edit conflict occurs. The second user is then given an opportunity to merge their content into
1386-555: Is now endorsed by the W3C, indicating its readiness for deployment to the public, and encouraging more widespread support among implementors and authors. Recommendations can sometimes be implemented incorrectly, partially, or not at all, but many standards define two or more levels of conformance that developers must follow if they wish to label their product as W3C-compliant. A recommendation may be updated or extended by separately-published, non-technical errata or editor drafts until sufficient substantial edits accumulate for producing
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#17328761430551452-446: Is oriented towards Semantic Web technology and standards such as Resource Description Framework (RDF). SIMILE stands for Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments. It was born out of DSpace , the open source system digital repository for scholarly materials developed at MIT. DSpace, which is now used at a number of research institutions, archives scholarly publications, making it possible to federate
1518-535: Is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license and partly in the public domain . Specifically, the manuals and other content at MediaWiki.org are Creative Commons -licensed, while the set of help pages intended to be freely copied into fresh wiki installations and/or distributed with MediaWiki software is public domain. This was done to eliminate legal issues arising from the help pages being imported into wikis with licenses that are incompatible with
1584-555: Is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web . Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee , the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. As of 5 March 2023, W3C had 462 members. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about
1650-562: Is the version of a standard that has passed the prior two levels. The users of the standard provide input. At this stage, the document is submitted to the W3C Advisory Council for final approval. While this step is important, it rarely causes any significant changes to a standard as it passes to the next phase. This is the most mature stage of development. At this point, the standard has undergone extensive review and testing, under both theoretical and practical conditions. The standard
1716-489: Is therefore guaranteed to be thoroughly tested, will continue to be developed well into the future, and future technicians on these wikis will be more likely to have exposure to MediaWiki than any other wiki software." The Free Software Foundation uses MediaWiki to implement the LibrePlanet site. MediaWiki provides a rich core feature set and a mechanism to attach extensions to provide additional functionality. Due to
1782-459: Is written in the PHP programming language and stores all text content into a database . The software is optimized to efficiently handle large projects, which can have terabytes of content and hundreds of thousands of views per second. Because Misplaced Pages is one of the world's largest and most visited websites, achieving scalability through multiple layers of caching and database replication has been
1848-658: The Electronic Frontier Foundation 's resignation from W3C. As feared by the opponents of EME, as of 2020 , none of the widely used Content Decryption Modules used with EME are available for licensing without a per-browser licensing fee. W3C/ Internet Engineering Task Force standards (over Internet protocol suite ): MediaWiki MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Misplaced Pages on January 25, 2002, and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker , after which development has been coordinated by
1914-1002: The MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (located in Stata Center ) in the United States, the (in Sophia Antipolis , France), Keio University (in Japan) and Beihang University (in China), the W3C incorporated as a legal entity, becoming a public-interest not-for-profit organization . The W3C has a staff team of 70–80 worldwide as of 2015 . W3C is run by a management team which allocates resources and designs strategy, led by CEO Jeffrey Jaffe (as of March 2010), former CTO of Novell . It also includes an advisory board that supports strategy and legal matters and helps resolve conflicts. The majority of standardization work
1980-500: The University of Cologne , as well as a Misplaced Pages editor —began working on new software that would replace UseModWiki, specifically designed for use by Misplaced Pages. This software was written in the PHP scripting language, and stored all of its information in a MySQL database. The new software was largely developed by August 24, 2001, and a test wiki for it was established shortly thereafter. The first full implementation of this software
2046-538: The Wikimedia Foundation , took up the role of release manager . Major milestones in MediaWiki's development have included: the categorization system (2004); parser functions, (2006); Flagged Revisions , (2008); the " ResourceLoader ", a delivery system for CSS and JavaScript (2011); and the VisualEditor , a "what you see is what you get" ( WYSIWYG ) editing platform (2013). The contest of designing
SIMILE - Misplaced Pages Continue
2112-608: The Wikimedia Foundation . It powers several wiki hosting websites across the Internet, as well as most websites hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation including Misplaced Pages, Wiktionary , Wikimedia Commons , Wikiquote , Meta-Wiki and Wikidata , which define a large part of the set requirements for the software. Besides its usage on Wikimedia sites, MediaWiki has been used as a knowledge management and content management system on websites such as Fandom , wikiHow and major internal installations like Intellipedia and Diplopedia . MediaWiki
2178-496: The Wikimedia Foundation . MediaWiki developers participate in the Google Summer of Code by facilitating the assignment of mentors to students wishing to work on MediaWiki core and extension projects. During the year prior to November 2012, there were about two hundred developers who had committed changes to the MediaWiki core or extensions. Major MediaWiki releases are generated approximately every six months by taking snapshots of
2244-524: The API. MediaWiki supports rich content generated through specialized syntax. For example, the software comes with optional support for rendering mathematical formulas using LaTeX and a special parser written in OCaml named texvc. Similar functionality for other content, ranging from graphical timelines over mathematical plotting and musical scores to Egyptian hieroglyphs , is available via extensions. The software has become more powerful at dealing with
2310-514: The API. The API is accessed via URLs such as https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&list=recentchanges . In this case, the query would be asking Misplaced Pages for information relating to the last 10 edits to the site. One of the perceived advantages of the API is its language independence; it listens for HTTP connections from clients and can send a response in a variety of formats, such as XML , serialized PHP, or JSON . Client code has been developed to provide layers of abstraction to
2376-665: The Asian host in September 1996. Starting in 1997, W3C created regional offices around the world. As of September 2009, it had eighteen World Offices covering Australia, the Benelux countries (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Austria, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, South Korea, Morocco, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, and, as of 2016, the United Kingdom and Ireland. In October 2012, W3C convened
2442-517: The Creative Commons license. MediaWiki's development has generally favored the use of open-source media formats . MediaWiki has an active volunteer community for development and maintenance. Users who have made meaningful contributions to the project by submitting patches are generally, upon request, granted access to commit revisions to the project's Git / Gerrit repository . There are also paid programmers who primarily develop projects for
2508-517: The MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle, are designed to further enhance the multilingualism and internationalization of MediaWiki. Installation of MediaWiki requires that the user have administrative privileges on a server running both PHP and a compatible type of SQL database . Some users find that setting up a virtual host is helpful if the majority of one's site runs under a framework (such as Zope or Ruby on Rails ) that
2574-450: The W3C started considering adding DRM -specific Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) to HTML5 , which was criticised as being against the openness, interoperability, and vendor neutrality that distinguished websites built using only W3C standards from those requiring proprietary plug-ins like Flash . On 18 September 2017, the W3C published the EME specification as a recommendation, leading to
2640-516: The W3C. Many guidelines and requirements are stated in detail, but there is no final guideline about the process or standards by which membership might be finally approved or denied. The cost of membership is given on a sliding scale, depending on the character of the organization applying and the country in which it is located. Countries are categorized by the World Bank 's most recent grouping by gross national income per capita. In 2012 and 2013,
2706-828: The Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee after he left the European Organization for Nuclear Research ( CERN ) in October 1994. It was founded at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Laboratory for Computer Science with support from the European Commission , and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency , which had pioneered the ARPANET ,
SIMILE - Misplaced Pages Continue
2772-593: The collections of the various holding libraries and combining materials across disciplines. The SIMILE project grew from the need to support metadata schemas in research materials which has been described in various domain-specific ways, and provides a capability beyond Dublin Core . The challenge for DSpace and other digital libraries is to assist communities in dealing with different schemes, vocabularies, ontologies and metadata and to provide research services to their users. W3C The World Wide Web Consortium ( W3C )
2838-421: The data contained in the MediaWiki databases. Client programs can use the API to log in, get data, and post changes. The API supports thin web-based JavaScript clients and end-user applications (such as vandal-fighting tools). The API can be accessed by the backend of another web site. An extensive Python bot library, Pywikibot , and a popular semi-automated tool called AutoWikiBrowser , also interface with
2904-441: The development branch, which is kept continuously in a runnable state; minor releases , or point releases , are issued as needed to correct bugs (especially security problems). MediaWiki is developed on a continuous integration development model, in which software changes are pushed live to Wikimedia sites on regular basis. MediaWiki also has a public bug tracker, phabricator.wikimedia.org , which runs Phabricator . The site
2970-676: The differences between wiki markup and HTML: "Take some more tea ," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly. "I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more." "You mean you can't take less ," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing." (Quotation above from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll ) MediaWiki's default page-editing tools have been described as somewhat challenging to learn. A survey of students assigned to use
3036-441: The earliest such features is namespaces . One of Misplaced Pages's earliest problems had been the separation of encyclopedic content from pages pertaining to maintenance and communal discussion, as well as personal pages about encyclopedia editors. Namespaces are prefixes before a page title (such as " User: " or " Talk: ") that serve as descriptors for the page's purpose and allow multiple pages with different functions to exist under
3102-451: The editing user, the edit summary, the page edited, as well as any tags (e.g. "possible vandalism ") added by customizable abuse filters and other extensions to aid in combating unhelpful edits. On more active wikis, so many edits occur that it is hard to track Recent Changes manually. Anti-vandal software, including user-assisted tools, is sometimes employed on such wikis to process Recent Changes items. Server load can be reduced by sending
3168-455: The first integer in the title (e.g. CSS3 = Level 3). Subsequent revisions on each level are denoted by an integer following a decimal point (for example, CSS2.1 = Revision 1). The W3C standard formation process is defined within the W3C process document, outlining four maturity levels through which each new standard or recommendation must progress. After enough content has been gathered from 'editor drafts' and discussion, it may be published as
3234-706: The most direct predecessor to the modern Internet . It was located in Technology Square until 2004, when it moved, with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, to the Stata Center. The organization tries to foster compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards defined by the W3C. Incompatible versions of HTML are offered by different vendors, causing inconsistency in how web pages are displayed. The consortium tries to get all those vendors to implement
3300-478: The next time it is refreshed. As with the recent changes page, recent edits that appear on the watchlist contain clickable links for easy review of the article history and specific changes made. There is also the capability to review all edits made by any particular user. In this way, if an edit is identified as problematic, it is possible to check the user's other edits for issues. MediaWiki allows one to link to specific versions of articles. This has been useful to
3366-553: The page as it now exists following the first user's page save. MediaWiki's user interface has been localized in many different languages. A language for the wiki content itself can also be set, to be sent in the "Content-Language" HTTP header and "lang" HTML attribute . VisualEditor has its own integrated wikitext editing interface known as 2017 wikitext editor, the older editing interface is known as 2010 wikitext editor. MediaWiki has an extensible web API ( application programming interface ) that provides direct, high-level access to
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#17328761430553432-490: The purpose of creating an encyclopedia, where accuracy in titles is important. MediaWiki uses an extensible lightweight wiki markup designed to be easier to use and learn than HTML . Tools exist for converting content such as tables between MediaWiki markup and HTML. Efforts have been made to create a MediaWiki markup spec, but a consensus seems to have been reached that Wikicode requires context-sensitive grammar rules. The following side-by-side comparison illustrates
3498-489: The same title. For instance, a page titled " [[The Terminator]] ", in the default namespace, could describe the 1984 movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger , while a page titled " [[User:The Terminator]] " could be a profile describing a user who chooses this name as a pseudonym. More commonly, each namespace has an associated " Talk: " namespace, which can be used to discuss its contents, such as " User talk: " or " Template talk: ". The purpose of having discussion pages
3564-415: The same topic in other editions of Misplaced Pages. This was superseded by the launch of Wikidata. Page tabs are displayed at the top of pages. These tabs allow users to perform actions or view pages that are related to the current page. The available default actions include viewing, editing, and discussing the current page. The specific tabs displayed depend on whether the user is logged into the wiki and whether
3630-458: The same way as namespaces. A set of interwiki prefixes can be configured to cause, for instance, a page title of wikiquote:Jimbo Wales to direct the user to the Jimbo Wales article on Wikiquote . Unlike internal wikilinks, interwiki links lack page existence detection functionality, and accordingly there is no way to tell whether a blue interwiki link is broken or not. Interlanguage links are
3696-698: The scientific community, in that expert peer reviewers could analyse articles, improve them and provide links to the trusted version of that article. Navigation through the wiki is largely through internal wikilinks. MediaWiki's wikilinks implement page existence detection, in which a link is colored blue if the target page exists on the local wiki and red if it does not. If a user clicks on a red link, they are prompted to create an article with that title. Page existence detection makes it practical for users to create "wikified" articles—that is, articles containing links to other pertinent subjects—without those other articles being yet in existence. Interwiki links function much
3762-401: The small navigation links that show up in the sidebar in most MediaWiki skins that connect an article with related articles in other languages within the same Wiki family. This can provide language-specific communities connected by a larger context, with all wikis on the same server or each on its own server. Previously, Misplaced Pages used interlanguage links to link an article to other articles on
3828-616: The standard matures. A candidate recommendation is a version of a more mature standard than the WD. At this point, the group responsible for the standard is satisfied that the standard meets its goal. The purpose of the CR is to elicit aid from the development community on how implementable the standard is. The standard document may change further, but significant features are mostly decided at this point. The design of those features can still change due to feedback from implementors. A proposed recommendation
3894-479: The strong emphasis on multilingualism in the Wikimedia projects, internationalization and localization has received significant attention by developers. The user interface has been fully or partially translated into more than 400 languages on translatewiki.net , and can be further customized by site administrators (the entire interface is editable through the wiki). Several extensions, most notably those collected in
3960-489: The user has sysop privileges on the wiki. For instance, the ability to move a page or add it to one's watchlist is usually restricted to logged-in users. The site administrator can add or remove tabs by using JavaScript or installing extensions. Each page has an associated history page from which the user can access every version of the page that has ever existed and generate diffs between two versions of his choice. Users' contributions are displayed not only here, but also via
4026-515: Was also written in PHP, with a MySQL backend, and kept the basic interface of the phase II software, but with the added functionality of a wider scalability . The "phase III" software went live on Misplaced Pages in July 2002. The Wikimedia Foundation was announced on June 20, 2003. In July, Misplaced Pages contributor Daniel Mayer suggested the name "MediaWiki" for the software, as a play on "Wikimedia". The MediaWiki name
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#17328761430554092-427: Was chosen to represent MediaWiki rather than Misplaced Pages, with the second place logo being used for the Wikimedia Foundation. The double square brackets ( [[ ]] ) symbolize the syntax MediaWiki uses for creating hyperlinks to other wiki pages; while the sunflower represents the diversity of content on Misplaced Pages, its constant growth, and the wilderness. Later, Brooke Vibber , the chief technical officer of
4158-512: Was gradually phased in, beginning in August 2003. The name has frequently caused confusion due to its (intentional) similarity to the "Wikimedia" name (which itself is similar to "Misplaced Pages"). The old product logo was created by Erik Möller , using a flower photograph taken by Florence Nibart-Devouard , and was originally submitted to the logo contest for a new Misplaced Pages logo , held from July 20 to August 27, 2003. The logo came in third place, and
4224-493: Was the new Meta Misplaced Pages on November 9, 2001. There was a desire to have it implemented immediately on the English-language Misplaced Pages. However, Manske was apprehensive about any potential bugs harming the nascent website during the period of the final exams he had to complete immediately prior to Christmas; this led to the launch on the English-language Misplaced Pages being delayed until January 25, 2002. The software
4290-400: Was the use of " free links " instead of CamelCase . When MediaWiki was created, it was typical for wikis to require text like "WorldWideWeb" to create a link to a page about the World Wide Web ; links in MediaWiki, on the other hand, are created by surrounding words with double square brackets, and any spaces between them are left intact, e.g. [[World Wide Web]] . This change was logical for
4356-486: Was then, gradually, deployed on all the Misplaced Pages language sites of that time. This software was referred to as "the PHP script" and as "phase II", with the name "phase I", retroactively given to the use of UseModWiki. Increasing usage soon caused load problems to arise again, and soon after, another rewrite of the software began; this time being done by Lee Daniel Crocker , which became known as "phase III". This new software
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