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History

MediaWiki is a free and open-source wiki software platform originally developed for Wikipedia by Magnus Manske and improved by Lee Daniel Crocker. It was first released in January 2002 under the name "Phase III".

The software was redesigned in 2002 to handle the growing demands of Wikipedia, which had become one of the most popular websites on the internet. In July 2013, MediaWiki was used by more than 50 million websites worldwide.

Key milestones include:

• Release of version 1.0 in 2003
• Introduction of the API in 2007
• Launch of VisualEditor in 2013
• Implementation of modern REST API in 2019

MediaWiki is written primarily in PHP and stores content in a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite.

Features

MediaWiki offers a wide range of features for content management and collaboration:

1. Extensibility: Over 2,000 extensions available
2. Multilingual support: Supports more than 350 languages
3. Rich media handling: Images, videos, and audio files
4. Version control: Complete revision history tracking

The platform includes several built-in tools:

• Parser functions: For advanced template logic
• Magic words: Dynamic content generation
• Categories: Hierarchical content organization
• Namespace system: Content separation and management

According to the MediaWiki developers, the software is designed to be "scalable and feature-rich" while maintaining ease of use. The platform can handle wikis ranging from small personal projects to massive sites like Wikipedia with millions of pages.

MediaWiki uses the GNU General Public License v2+, making it free to use, modify, and distribute.

Carmack Map used in the reconstruction of the original environment. This caption is intentionally long to test how MediaWiki handles multi-line captions under thumbnail images. It provides a detailed description of the image’s purpose, historical context, and relevance to the page content. It also demonstrates how the caption text wraps naturally and remains aligned directly beneath the image.

There is also this 1748 map done by French hydrographer Jacque-Nicolas Bellin of the island of Joanna with the names "Comore" and "Meroni" on it:

Figure 5. Carmack's caption: "Full map, Carte de l’Isle d’Anjouan, by
Jacque-Nicolas Bellin. Courtesy the author’s collection."

Figure 6. Carmack's caption: "Detail of map, Carte de l’Isle d’Anjouan, Une des
Isles de Comore par le Cape Cornwal, from Abbé Prévost’s sixteen-volume
Histoire Générale des Voyages (1748) by Jacque-Nicolas Bellin. Courtesy the
author’s collection."

A 1752 version of the same map has the name spelled as "Merone":