MediaWiki

What is MediaWiki?

MediaWiki is a free, open source wiki engine — the software that runs Wikipedia and tens of thousands of other sites. It stores collaboratively edited pages written in wikitext (or a visual editor), keeps a full revision history of every change, and scales from a small internal knowledge base to one of the largest websites in the world.

What is MediaWiki best for?

MediaWiki suits teams and communities whose long-term asset is the content itself — large, densely cross-linked reference material that many people edit over years. It’s the standard choice for public knowledge bases, internal documentation, fan wikis, and multilingual encyclopedias. It’s a strong fit when you need version control, granular permissions, and structured, searchable pages more than a polished team workspace.

What can MediaWiki do?

• Collaborative page editing in wikitext or a WYSIWYG VisualEditor, with a full, revertible revision history for every page.
• A library of 11,000+ extensions — Semantic MediaWiki for structured data, Cite for references, templates and parser functions for reusable content.
• Powerful multilingual support, used to run Wikipedia in 300+ languages.
• Fine-grained user rights, namespaces, categories, and watchlists for organizing and moderating content.
• Full-text search, file/media uploads with thumbnailing, and a maintenance-script tool set for admins.
• A stable API for bots, imports, and integrations, plus skins to reskin the interface.

Where does MediaWiki fall short?

• Steep editing and admin learning curve. Wikitext markup, templates, and parser functions are far less approachable than the block editors in Notion or Confluence; non-technical editors often need training before they’re productive.
• Bare-bones out of the box. The default install is deliberately encyclopedia-shaped — no built-in real-time co-editing, comments, or modern workspace features. Reaching Confluence-style functionality means assembling and maintaining a stack of extensions.
• Dated default UX. Even with the Vector 2022 skin and VisualEditor, MediaWiki looks and feels like a reference site rather than a sleek team app, which can be a hard sell for teams expecting Notion-style polish.

Is MediaWiki free?

Yes — MediaWiki is completely free and open source under the GPL-2.0-or-later license, with no licensing fees, user tiers, or paid editions. You download it and self-host it yourself. The only costs are your own hosting and the operational effort of running and upgrading it. There is no official paid cloud; managed hosting comes from third parties like WikiTeq or Wikibase Cloud.

What does MediaWiki replace?

MediaWiki is a self-hostable, no-license-fee stand-in for paid knowledge and collaboration platforms — most directly Confluence, and for wiki-style use cases Notion and SharePoint. It trades their turnkey polish and managed hosting for full ownership of your data, unlimited editors at no per-seat cost, and deep extensibility.

FAQ

Is MediaWiki open source? Yes. MediaWiki is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license and developed in the open by the Wikimedia Foundation and a large volunteer community on GitHub.

Can I self-host MediaWiki for free? Yes. There are no license fees or seat limits — you host it on your own server and pay only for infrastructure. It’s the same software that runs Wikipedia, so it scales well when configured with caching.

Is MediaWiki a good Confluence alternative? It’s a strong fit when the content is the long-term asset and you want to avoid per-user pricing and vendor lock-in. It’s a weaker fit if you mainly want a polished team workspace with real-time editing out of the box — there, lighter tools like Wiki.js, BookStack, or Outline may be easier to run.

What do I need to run MediaWiki? A web server (Apache or Nginx), PHP 8.3+, and a database — MariaDB 10.3+/MySQL 5.7+, PostgreSQL 10+, or SQLite. Minimum recommended is around 256 MB RAM for a small site; active public sites with uploads need more, plus ImageMagick or GD for thumbnails.