About Us

Yes. **MediaWiki is a CMS, but it is a very specialized one.** It is best known as the software behind Wikipedia.

1. 1. 1. Why do people use MediaWiki?

MediaWiki is designed primarily for **knowledge bases, documentation, encyclopedias, and collaborative websites**, rather than normal business websites.

Its biggest strengths are:

• **Collaborative editing** — many users can create and edit articles.
• **Revision history** — every change is recorded, so you can see who changed what and revert changes.
• **User permissions** — administrators can control who can edit, create pages, upload files, etc.
• **Huge-scale content** — it can handle tens of thousands or millions of pages.
• **Categories and internal linking** — excellent for organizing large amounts of related information.
• **Templates** — reusable structures can be created for pages.
• **Extensions** — there are many extensions for adding functionality.
• **Discussion/history features** — useful for communities and documentation projects.
• **Open source and free** — no CMS licensing cost.

For example, if you're building:

> "A knowledge base containing 50,000 articles about historical documents, with multiple researchers editing and reviewing them"

MediaWiki makes a lot of sense.







1. 1. 1. But MediaWiki is NOT necessarily the best choice for a normal website

If someone wants:

> Company website → Home / About / Services / Blog / Contact

I would generally **not recommend MediaWiki**.

WordPress, for example, is much more suitable because it gives you a better visual editing experience, themes, page builders, plugins, SEO tools, forms, ecommerce, etc.

1. 1. 1. What are the alternatives?

It depends heavily on **what you're building**:

| CMS | Best for | Difficulty | | ------------- | --------------------------------------- | ----------- | | **MediaWiki** | Wikipedia-style knowledge bases | Medium–High | | **WordPress** | Business websites, blogs, content sites | Easy–Medium | | **Drupal** | Large/complex content platforms | High | | **Joomla** | General CMS + portals | Medium | | **DokuWiki** | Simple documentation/wiki | Easy–Medium | | **BookStack** | Internal documentation/knowledge bases | Easy | | **Wiki.js** | Modern knowledge bases/wiki | Medium | | **Outline** | Modern team documentation | Easy | | **Ghost** | Publishing/blogging | Easy | | **Webflow** | Visual marketing websites | Easy–Medium |

1. 1. 1. MediaWiki vs modern alternatives

If your goal is specifically a **wiki/knowledge base**, I'd look at these:

• • 1. Wiki.js — probably the most interesting modern alternative**

It's much more modern-looking than traditional MediaWiki and supports Markdown, visual editing, authentication, search, permissions, etc.

• • 2. BookStack — excellent for internal documentation**

Very straightforward. Its structure is essentially:

> Shelves → Books → Chapters → Pages

This works extremely well for company manuals, technical documentation, SOPs, etc.

• • 3. DokuWiki — lightweight and simple**

Good if you want a relatively small documentation/wiki system without the complexity of MediaWiki.

• • 4. Outline — excellent modern UX**

Particularly good for teams that want something resembling Notion/Confluence rather than Wikipedia.

1. 1. 1. The important distinction

Think of it this way:

• • MediaWiki**

→ "We have a massive amount of interconnected knowledge and many people need to maintain it."

• • WordPress**

→ "We need a website where administrators can easily publish and manage content."

• • BookStack / Wiki.js / Outline**

→ "We need a modern documentation/knowledge-base platform."

So if you're asking because **a client currently has a MediaWiki website and wants to redesign/migrate it**, tell me what type of website it is and roughly how many pages/articles it has. I can tell you whether **MediaWiki should be kept or migrated to WordPress, Wiki.js, BookStack, etc.**, and what the migration difficulty would be.