Introduction
This book is a book about how to install, use, manage, and extend a wiki using MediaWiki, the wiki engine used to power one of the world's most famous wikis, Wikipedia.
Wikis are the sleeper hit of the Internet, with roots that extend far back into the old days—the very first wiki deployed by wiki inventor Ward Cunningham was released to the world on March 25, 1995. (It can still be found at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki, with an informative history of those early days at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiHistory.) After that release, wikis crept along with an enthusiastic but narrowly defined group of devotees, programmers working on project teams who used wikis for software documentation. Credit for the sudden turn-around in fame (if not fortune) for wikis is certainly due to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that nearly anyone can contribute to and edit.
According to Wikipedia, this wiki started on January 15, 2001. At the time of this writing, there are well over 1.5 million English language articles and over 3 million user accounts. You can find the latest statistics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Statistics.
In late 2005, Wikipedia garnered a bit of negative publicity as the result of a few bad posts, but on December 14, 2005, the well-respected scientific journal Nature published a report that found that Wikipedia's accuracy was comparable to the accuracy of Encyclopedia Britannica. As one might expect, this generated some protestations from Encyclopedia Britannica. ...
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