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Cue mediawiki slideshow 5 minutes prior to presentation
MediaWiki is the free software (GPL) that runs Wikipedia under the auspices of the [http://www.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia Foundation].
I'm Greg Rundlett [http://iic.harvard.edu/people] [http://freephile.com] [http://rundlett.com], a free software advocate who lives in Newburyport, MA with my wife and two sons. I'm here to show you a lot of things about the wiki system called MediaWiki and hope that you'll take away a lot from this presentation. The great thing about sharing knowledge; like sharing free software; is that you can take away as much as you possibly can and I may take away an even greater knowledge than I started with just from our sharing. Nobody has less, everybody has more.
I'm not going into a detailed comparison of various wikis, trying to argue which is best. But I'll point out a few reasons why you should care about MediaWiki in case you don't know.
It's the most popular wiki in the world; both in terms of hosting the largest single wiki Wikipedia as well as deployments by all sort of individuals, groups and corporations. In practical terms that means people you hire will know mediawiki.The growth curve of MediaWiki is exponential. The quality of the software is excellent.
Does your wiki have [http://wikimania2006.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page conferences]?
WikiPedia now has over ten million articles across 250 languages!
Does your wiki have [http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home a foundation] to keep it going?
Does your wiki have a [http://commons.wikimedia.org/ multimedia repository] which hosts over 3,400,000 multimedia files? Wikimedia Commons does.
I do want to point out that MediaWiki does not use <ref>CamelCase</ref> words in order to make a link. This means a lot to all the Irish people of the world, and also the marketers who seem pretty convinced of the coolness of McWords like ThinkPad, etc.
