MediaWiki is the software that powers the Wikimedia suite of wikis.
Read more about MediaWiki on Wikipedia
Available since: version 0.20.0
MediaWiki on FreedomBox is configured to be publicly readable and privately editable. Only logged in users can make edits to the wiki. This configuration prevents spam and vandalism on the wiki.
Users can be created by the MediaWiki administrator (user "admin") only. The "admin" user can also be used to reset passwords of MediaWiki users. The administrator password, if forgotten can be reset anytime from the MediaWiki page in the Plinth UI.
MediaWiki is quite versatile and can be put to many creative uses. It also comes with a lot of plugins and themes and is highly customizable.
MediaWiki on FreedomBox can be your own personal knowledge repository. Since MediaWiki has good multimedia support, you can write notes, store images, create checklists, store references and bookmarks etc. in an organized manner. You can store the knowledge of a lifetime in your MediaWiki instance.
A community of users can use MediaWiki as their common repository of knowledge and reference material. It can used as a college notice board, documentation server for a small company, common notebook for study groups or as a fan wiki like wikia.
Several websites on the internet are simply MediaWiki instances. MediaWiki on FreedomBox is read-only to visitors. Hence, it can be adapted to serve as your personal website and/or blog. MediaWiki content is easy to export and can be later moved to use another blog engine.
MediWiki's new Visual Editor gives a WYSIWYG user interface to creating wiki pages. Unfortunately, it is not yet available in the current version of MediaWiki on Debian.
You don't have to necessarily learn the MediaWiki formatting language. You can write in your favorite format (Markdown, Org-mode, LaTeX etc.) and convert it to the MediaWiki format using Pandoc.