Miraheze

Last updated

Miraheze
Miraheze-Logo.svg
Screenshot
Miraheze Meta Vector 2022 skin.png
Screenshot of the Meta Miraheze home page
Type of business Not-for-profit private limited company [1] [2]
Type of site
 Wiki hosting service
Available inMultilingual
Country of origin England, United Kingdom [1]
OwnerMiraheze Limited [1]
Founder(s) John Lewis & Ferran Tufan [3]
Key peopleOwen Baines (Secretary, Treasurer and Chair)
Revenue Donations
URL miraheze.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional (requirements for editing differ between wikis)
LaunchedJuly 2015;8 years ago (July 2015) [1]
Current statusOnline
Content license
Written in PHP

Miraheze is a not-for-profit [6] open-source [7] wiki hosting service, [8] founded in July 2015 and run by a group of expert volunteers. Miraheze uses MediaWiki, the open-source wiki software used by Wikipedia, and hosts over 5,000 wikis as of 2022. It relies on donations for funding and does not impose advertisements on the wikis it hosts. [6]

Contents

History

Miraheze was founded in July 2015 by John Lewis and Ferran Tufan [9] and within a couple of weeks, they drafted the support of several volunteers from another wiki farm, Orain. [note 1] [9] The goal was to create a community-led wiki farm based on the Wikimedia model of community governance where the community is consulted in all decision making. At the time, Lewis was volunteering for the Wikimedia Foundation and deploying two servers there named after stars Mira and Heze and suggested the name Miraheze for the new wiki farm. [5] [10] [11] Miraheze opened wikis to the public on the 3rd of August 2015. [11]

In November 2019, Miraheze became a registered not-for-profit organization in the United Kingdom as Miraheze Limited. [1] [2] [12]

Features

Miraheze is community-led, wikis are autonomous, [6] [13] and the users are consulted in all decision-making. Stewards manage the community aspects and day-to-day admin tasks, [9] while the technical staff focus on the backend. [11]

Wikis are created upon request, and are approved by volunteer users known as 'wiki creators'. Wikis are created and hosted for free and can be either public or private. Miraheze is supported by its community and has no advertising. [6] Members can contribute their time, money, or expertise.

Miraheze allows wiki bureaucrats to choose to implement or remove a variety of MediaWiki extensions that Miraheze offers on their wikis, as well as choose the licensing status of their wiki. [4] They also allow wiki owners to put a custom domain to their wikis. Wikis hosted on Miraheze can also use images uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

Miraheze uses Phabricator in order for volunteer users to collaborate on the source code of the site, as well as for users to request and propose new features to be added. [14]

Miraheze extensions

Miraheze also develops its own extensions that allow communities to operate wikis with little need of oversight from Miraheze staff. ManageWiki is a special MediaWiki extension developed for Miraheze that allows bureaucrats to quickly and easily modify their wiki's settings; from basic changes like setting the logo and enabling extensions, to more complex changes such as creating user groups and customizing every action a given group of users can (not) do, and more.

Notable wikis

Since 2021, Miraheze has become home to wikis closed by Fandom, deemed to violate their community creation policy. This included wikis for the Monster Girl Encyclopedia, Monster Girl Quest, Agent Aika and Polandball , among others. [15] They have also become home to various long standing LGBT+ wikis forcefully merged into one and purged of many articles by Fandom, such as the LGBTA Wiki and EZGender Wiki. [6]

A student-led wiki for Northeastern University students called Huskypedia was started in 2022 on Miraheze in face of dissatisfaction with existing online resources of student information provided by the university. [16]

Miraheze is used by the University of Hildesheim as an educational tool [17] and is used by wikis such as Rosetta Code. [18]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Orain was founded in July 2013 in response to other wiki farms at that time with restrictions on content, either for free with advertising or without advertising for a fee and with few options for customisation. Orain encouraged their users to help with the infrastructure and released their system under open-source licensing. In September 2015, their servers were compromised and all content was deleted. Subsequently, their domains redirected users to pornographic websites for a while before completely going offline.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wiki software</span> Software to run a collaborative wiki. (Including private wiki)

Wiki software, is collaborative software that runs a wiki, which allows the users to create and collaboratively edit pages or entries via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis are a type of web content management system, and the most commonly supported off-the-shelf software that web hosting facilities offer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MediaWiki</span> Free and open-source wiki software, used by Wikipedia

MediaWiki is free and open-source wiki software originally developed by Magnus Manske for use on Wikipedia on January 25, 2002 and further improved by Lee Daniel Crocker, after which it has since been coordinated by the Wikimedia Foundation. It powers most websites hosted by the Foundation including Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, Wikiquote, Meta-Wiki and Wikidata, which define a large part of the set requirements for the software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikibooks</span> Free resource library of books hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited by volunteers

Wikibooks is a wiki-based Wikimedia project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation for the creation of free content digital textbooks and annotated texts that anyone can edit.

Open-source journalism, a close cousin to citizen journalism or participatory journalism, is a term coined in the title of a 1999 article by Andrew Leonard of Salon.com. Although the term was not actually used in the body text of Leonard's article, the headline encapsulated a collaboration between users of the internet technology blog Slashdot and a writer for Jane's Intelligence Review. The writer, Johan J. Ingles-le Nobel, had solicited feedback on a story about cyberterrorism from Slashdot readers, and then re-wrote his story based on that feedback and compensated the Slashdot writers whose information and words he used.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ConTeXt</span> General-purpose document processor, derived from TeX

ConTeXt is a general-purpose document processor. Like LaTeX, it is derived from TeX. It is especially suited for structured documents, automated document production, very fine typography, and multilingual typesetting. It is based in part on the TeX typesetting system, and uses a document markup language for manuscript preparation. The typographical and automated capabilities of ConTeXt are extensive, including interfaces for handling microtypography, multiple footnotes and footnote classes, and manipulating OpenType fonts and features. Moreover, it offers extensive support for colors, backgrounds, hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation. It gives the user extensive control over formatting while making it easy to create new layouts and styles without learning the low-level TeX macro language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Big and Ugly Rendering Project</span> BOINC based volunteer computing project for rendering videos

Big and Ugly Rendering Project (BURP) is a non-commercial volunteer computing project using the BOINC framework for the rendering of 3D graphics that has been in hibernation as of 2020. The project website currently shows the status as "extended maintenance" until 2027.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">XWiki</span> Wiki engine

XWiki is a free wiki software platform written in Java with a design emphasis on extensibility. XWiki is an enterprise wiki. It includes WYSIWYG editing, OpenDocument based document import/export, semantic annotations and tagging, and advanced permissions management.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mercurial</span> Distributed revision-control tool for software developers

Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows and Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia movement</span> Group of global contributors to Wikimedia projects

The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. This community directly builds and administers these projects with the commitment of achieving this using open standards and software.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scratch (programming language)</span> Programming language learning environment

Scratch is a high-level block-based visual programming language and website aimed primarily at children as an educational tool, with a target audience of ages 8 to 16. Users on the site, called Scratchers, can create projects on the website using a block-like interface. Projects can be exported to standalone HTML5, Android apps, Bundle (macOS) and EXE files using external tools. Scratch was conceived and designed through collaborative National Science Foundation grants awarded to Mitchell Resnick and Yasmin Kafai. The service is developed by the MIT Media Lab, and has been translated into 70+ languages, and is used in most parts of the world. Scratch is taught and used in after-school centers, schools, and colleges, as well as other public knowledge institutions. As of 15 February 2023, community statistics on the language's official website show more than 123 million projects shared by over 103 million users, over 804 million total projects ever created, and more than 95 million monthly website visits.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikivoyage</span> Free travel guide that anyone can edit

Wikivoyage is a free web-based travel guide for travel destinations and travel topics written by volunteer authors. It is a sister project of Wikipedia and supported and hosted by the same non-profit Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). Wikivoyage has been called the "Wikipedia of travel guides".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Uncyclopedia</span> Satirical website that parodies Wikipedia

Uncyclopedia is a satirical online encyclopedia that parodies Wikipedia. Its logo, a hollow "puzzle potato", parodies Wikipedia's globe puzzle logo, and it styles itself as "the content-free encyclopedia", parodying Wikipedia's slogan of "the free encyclopedia". Founded in 2005 as an English-language wiki, the project spans more than 75 languages as well as several subprojects parodying other wikis. The English version has approximately 37,000 pages of content, second only to the Portuguese. Uncyclopedia's name is a portmanteau of the prefix un- and the word encyclopedia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of wikis</span> History of wiki collaborative platforms

The history of wikis began in 1994, when Ward Cunningham gave the name "WikiWikiWeb" to the knowledge base, which ran on his company's website at c2.com, and the wiki software that powered it. The wiki went public in March 1995, the date used in anniversary celebrations of the wiki's origins. c2.com is thus the first true wiki, or a website with pages and links that can be easily edited via the browser, with a reliable version history for each page. He chose "WikiWikiWeb" as the name based on his memories of the "Wiki Wiki Shuttle" at Honolulu International Airport, and because "wiki" is the Hawaiian word for "quick".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wikimedia Foundation</span> American charitable organization

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered as a charitable foundation under local laws. Best known as the hosting platform for Wikipedia, a crowdsourced online encyclopedia, it also hosts other related projects and MediaWiki, a wiki software.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fandom (website)</span> Wiki hosting service and domain

Fandom is a wiki hosting service that hosts wikis mainly on entertainment topics. The privately held, for-profit Delaware company was founded in October 2004 by Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales and Angela Beesley. Fandom was acquired in 2018 by TPG Inc. and Jon Miller through Integrated Media Co.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mozilla</span> Free and open-source software community, developer of Firefox and Thunderbird

Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, with only minor exceptions. The community is supported institutionally by the non-profit Mozilla Foundation and its tax-paying subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Phabricator</span> Development collaboration tool

Phabricator is a suite of web-based development collaboration tools, which includes a code review tool called Differential, a repository browser called Diffusion, a change monitoring tool called Herald, a bug tracker called Maniphest, and a wiki called Phriction.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Incorporation". Miraheze Meta. Archived from the original on 25 October 2021. Retrieved 24 March 2022.
  2. 1 2 "Miraheze Limited filing history". Companies House. Retrieved 21 October 2022.
  3. ↑ "Miraheze celebrates one year!". Miraheze Meta. Retrieved 24 March 2022.
  4. 1 2 "Tech:Changing your wiki license". Miraheze Meta Wiki.
  5. 1 2 "Miraheze celebrates three years!". Miraheze Meta Wiki.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 Holmes, Juwan J. (22 February 2022). "What's Happening with the LGBTQIA+ Wiki?". INTO. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  7. ↑ "Miraheze". GitHub repositories.
  8. ↑ Epler, Pam; Jacobs, Jodee (2022). Guide to Integrating Problem-based Learning Programs in Higher Education Classrooms. IGI Global. p. 27. ISBN   978-1-79988-179-7. OCLC   1311489671.
  9. 1 2 3 "Build Your Own Wiki Platform And Grow Your Community With Miraheze". Website Planet. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  10. ↑ "Why are you called Miraheze | FAQ". Miraheze Meta.
  11. 1 2 3 Yaron Koren (30 March 2019). "Episode 31: John Lewis". Between the Brackets (Podcast).
  12. ↑ "Miraheze's Future – How Miraheze Limited Will Remove Current Limits". Miraheze blog. 26 December 2019.
  13. ↑ "FAQ – To what degree are wikis autonomous?". Miraheze Meta. 19 October 2022. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
  14. ↑ "Miraheze Phabricator". phabricator.miraheze.org.
  15. ↑ "Monster Girl Encyclopedia Wiki Will Be Sacked By Host Due To 'Fetish' Content". Kotaku. 16 November 2021. Retrieved 24 June 2022.
  16. ↑ Bak, Jesica (1 November 2022). "Student-created Huskypedia aims to provide resources, information to students". The Huntington News . Retrieved 7 January 2023.
  17. ↑ Franziska Frank, Ninon (20 December 2021). ""Dazu haben wir ein Video!" – Tutorials als asynchrone Schulungsmittel" ['We have a video on this!'– tutorials as asynchronous training tools]. German Medicial Science (in German). doi:10.3205/mbi000515 . Retrieved 17 September 2022.
  18. ↑ "Rosetta Code". Rosetta Code. 24 August 2022. Retrieved 23 October 2022.
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