MediaWikibased

MediaWikibased is a modular content management framework that extends the open‑source MediaWiki engine to provide enhanced media handling capabilities. The project was initiated in 2014 by a group of developers from the Wikimedia community who aimed to make large‑scale photo and video repositories more accessible within wiki environments.

Core features of MediaWikibased include a custom upload pipeline that automatically generates thumbnails and transcodes videos for adaptive streaming. It also offers integrated metadata extraction, allowing users to embed EXIF, IPTC, and XMP data directly into the wiki markup. The platform bundles a set of Flask‑based RESTful APIs for programmatic access, facilitating automatic ingestion from external content management systems.

Designed with scalability in mind, MediaWikibased supports distributed storage backends such as Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and OpenStack Swift. It incorporates a role‑based access control system that is compatible with the existing MediaWiki permissions model, enabling site administrators to assign granular rights to editors and viewers.

The project is released under the AGPL‑3.0 license, encouraging community contributions. As of 2025, MediaWikibased has been adopted by several regional Wikimedia chapters for their multimedia archives, as well as by independent museums for public exhibition of digitized collections. The community maintains a public issue tracker and documentation portal on GitHub and hosts regular updates through the MediaWiki community mailing list.

MediaWikibased has been cited in academic papers on digital preservation and user‑generated content policies. Critics note that its heavy reliance on MediaWiki’s core code can lead to performance bottlenecks on very large deployments, although ongoing optimizations aim to mitigate these concerns.