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I Greg Rundlett started using wiki technology professionally back in 1999, which was before Wikipedia existed<ref>Wikipedia was launched in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, as a content incubator for Nupedia.com</ref>. Like Wikipedia, we based our work on the work of [http://c2.com/~ward/ Ward Cunningham], the original creator of the term 'wiki' <ref> Ward's Portland Pattern Repository was immediately popular and the discipline of extreme programming is one of the things that came about as a result.</ref> and the software which powered the concept of [http://c2.com/cgi/wiki a website that anyone could edit] right in the browser. Not only did the Wikipedia website take off to become the world's 6th most popular websitehosting the largest encyclopedia in the world <ref>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia</ref>, but also the "wiki way" of collaborating quickly and efficiently continued to take roots and expand as rapidly as the Internet itself.

Although the software itself is free, easy-to-use, and well documented; it often requires a dedicated professional to keep the system in tune, updated, configured and fully deployed using [[best practices]]. Some of the best features of MediaWiki are not built into the core software. Instead, they are available as [[extensions]]. Like the core, they are also freely available, easy-to-use and generally well documented. But again, it takes a dedicated professional to keep pace with the ongoing development of these extensions over time - ensuring that the right ones are deployed in the wiki and that the features of the system are obvious and accessible to its users. There are a few extensions which are game-changers: Semantic MediaWiki, [[Collections]] and the Visual Editor.