MediaWiki in the context of "Wiktionary"

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as a charitable foundation. The Foundation is most known for being the host of Wikipedia, one of the most visited websites in the world. It also hosts fourteen related open collaboration projects, and supports the development of MediaWiki, the wiki software which underpins them all. The foundation was established in 2003 in St. Petersburg, Florida by Jimmy Wales, as a non-profit way to fund Wikipedia and other wiki projects which had previously been hosted by Bomis, Wales' for-profit company.

The Wikimedia Foundation provides the technical and organizational infrastructure to enable members of the public to develop wiki-based content in languages across the world. The foundation does not write or curate any of the content on the projects themselves. Instead, this is done by volunteer editors, such as the Wikipedians. However, it does collaborate with a network of individual volunteers and affiliated organizations, such as Wikimedia chapters, thematic organizations, user groups and other partners.

A wiki (/ˈwɪki/ WICK-ee) is a form of hypertext publication on the internet which is collaboratively edited and managed by its audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages that can either be edited by the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base. Its name derives from the first user-editable website called WikiWikiWeb – wiki (pronounced [wiki]) is a Hawaiian word meaning 'quick'.

Wikis are powered by wiki software, also known as wiki engines. Being a form of content management system, these differ from other web-based systems such as blog software or static site generators in that the content is created without any defined owner or leader. Wikis have little inherent structure, allowing one to emerge according to the needs of the users. Wiki engines usually allow content to be written using a lightweight markup language and sometimes edited with the help of a rich-text editor. There are dozens of different wiki engines in use, both standalone and part of other software, such as bug tracking systems. Some wiki engines are free and open-source, whereas others are proprietary. Some permit control over different functions (levels of access); for example, editing rights may permit changing, adding, or removing material. Others may permit access without enforcing access control. Further rules may be imposed to organize content. In addition to hosting user-authored content, wikis allow those users to interact, hold discussions, and collaborate.

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written and maintained by a community of volunteers, known as Wikipedians, through open collaboration and the wiki software MediaWiki. Founded by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger in 2001, Wikipedia has been hosted since 2003 by the Wikimedia Foundation, an American nonprofit organization funded mainly by donations from readers. Wikipedia is the largest and most-read reference work in history.

Initially available only in English, Wikipedia exists in over 340 languages and is the world's ninth most visited website. The English Wikipedia, with over 7 million articles, remains the largest of the editions, which together comprise more than 66 million articles and attract more than 1.5 billion unique device visits and 13 million edits per month (about 5 edits per second on average) as of April 2024. As of September 2025, over 25% of Wikipedia's traffic comes from the United States, while Japan accounts for nearly 7%, and the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia each represent around 5%.

Wiki software (also known as a wiki engine or a wiki application) is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.

There are dozens of actively maintained wiki engines. They vary in the platforms they run on, the programming language they were developed in, whether they are open-source or proprietary, their support for natural language characters and conventions, and their assumptions about technical versus social control of editing.

Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative, public manner. Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite. The ability to examine the code facilitates public trust in the software.

Open-source software development can bring in diverse perspectives beyond those of a single company. A 2024 estimate of the value of open-source software to firms is $8.8 trillion, as firms would need to spend 3.5 times the amount they currently do without the use of open source software.

Deprecation is the discouragement of use of something human-made, such as a linguistic term, a proper name, a feature, design, functionality, piece of code, or practice. Typically a thing previously used is deprecated because it is—or is claimed or thought to be—inferior compared to other options now available. Deprecation is thus a mechanism for future improvement. Deprecation implies that the community (generally, or a community of experts, or a professional body governing a sector or industry) has determined that future use—of the term, name, device, design, or feature—is unwise; but also that its replacement or removal, from that which is extant, is not required or is non-urgent.

Something may be deprecated even though past or extant applications of it might still be useful or functional in particular contexts—the goal here need not be the complete replacement of that which has been deprecated but rather an improvement on some broad metric (eg, safety) of the stock of that thing over time. Thus: deprecation of archaic terms to obtain consistency and readability in language/terminology; deprecation of obsolete electrical components to improve safety and compatibility in the housing stock; or deprecation of certain shared code to improve an open-source software project.

wikiHow is an online wiki-style publication featuring informational articles and quizzes on a variety of topics. Founded in 2005 by Internet entrepreneur Jack Herrick, its aim is to create an extensive database of instructional content, using the wiki model of open collaboration to allow users to add, create, and modify content. It is a hybrid organization, a for-profit company run for a social mission. wikiHow uses a forked version of the free and open-source MediaWiki software; these modifications made by wikiHow were freely available to the general public via a self-serve download site from 2010 to late 2020, when wikiHow chose to discontinue the self-serve portal, citing vague "DoS attacks", as well as noting that publishing the source code is "not part of our core mission".

In February 2005, wikiHow had over 35.5 million unique visitors. As of December 2021, wikiHow contains more than 235,000 how-to articles and over 2.5 million registered users.