What Is MediaWiki?
CMSMediaWiki is the PHP wiki software that runs Wikipedia. Detection relies on its ResourceLoader (load.php), the versioned generator tag and its markup classes. A MediaWiki site is also reported as PHP.
Detect MediaWiki on any website:
Why MediaWiki Matters
If you're weighing MediaWiki for a new site, auditing a competitor's stack, or figuring out why a prospect's website looks the way it does, the platform choice drives everything downstream: hosting cost, SEO control, performance ceiling, and migration pain later. We've fingerprinted MediaWiki on 1 live sites in our database, so the answers here are grounded in real scan data — not marketing copy.
Does MediaWiki Mean a Site Was Built With AI?
No — MediaWiki points the other way.
MediaWiki is a content management system: sites are assembled from themes, templates and plugins by people, not generated end-to-end by an AI builder. A confident match therefore lowers the AI-likelihood estimate unless separate AI-tool artifacts are found in the delivered code.
How this feeds the score: builder fingerprints, bundle artifacts and AI-tool traces are weighed separately from stack context like frameworks, libraries and hosting. The full breakdown is on How scores work.
How Websites Using MediaWiki Work
- Script URLs through /w/load.php?modules=…
- `<meta name="generator" content="MediaWiki 1.x">`
- Classes such as mw-body and mw-parser-output
- A static landing page like wikipedia.org carries none of these
Best Practices When Working With MediaWiki
Based on patterns in our scan dataset and the detection evidence tiers.
- →Start by running a MediaWiki detection scan on any URL you're evaluating — the 80+ signal engine returns a confidence score plus the exact markers it matched, which beats reading view-source by hand.
- →Cross-check the result against the full detection evidence in /how-scores-work — confidence tiers tell you whether a match is strong (headers + scripts) or circumstantial (a single HTML pattern).
- →Pair this page with the builder gallery (/gallery/mediawiki) to see how MediaWiki sites look in the wild and spot the design patterns that repeat across real deployments.
- →For migration planning, compare MediaWiki against other CMSs in the same category — feature parity usually matters more than raw popularity.
How we detect MediaWiki — see our methodology: AI Influence Score calculation, evidence tiers, and fingerprint signal types.
How Our Detector Identifies MediaWiki
Our scanner analyzes multiple layers of a website's technical fingerprint to detect MediaWiki usage.
- Script URLs or inline script content matching "/load.php?["']*modules=" (high-confidence tier)
- HTML structure patterns such as "class=["']["']*mw-(body|parser-output|page-title)" (medium-confidence tier)
- Meta tags (generator, description, og:*) matching "MediaWiki N" (medium-confidence tier)
- Signal weights for MediaWiki: 85 points per high-tier match, 55 per medium, 25 per low — a site needs 60+ points before MediaWiki is reported.
Websites Built With MediaWiki
Real sites detected by our scanner
Frequently Asked Questions About MediaWiki
What is MediaWiki?+
MediaWiki is the PHP wiki software that runs Wikipedia. Detection relies on its ResourceLoader (load.php), the versioned generator tag and its markup classes. A MediaWiki site is also reported as PHP.
Does MediaWiki mean a website was built with AI?+
No — MediaWiki points the other way. MediaWiki is a content management system: sites are assembled from themes, templates and plugins by people, not generated end-to-end by an AI builder. A confident match therefore lowers the AI-likelihood estimate unless separate AI-tool artifacts are found in the delivered code.
Why does MediaWiki matter?+
If you're weighing MediaWiki for a new site, auditing a competitor's stack, or figuring out why a prospect's website looks the way it does, the platform choice drives everything downstream: hosting cost, SEO control, performance ceiling, and migration pain later. We've fingerprinted MediaWiki on 1 live sites in our database, so the answers here are grounded in real scan data — not marketing copy.
How do we detect MediaWiki?+
Our scanner checks for these signals: Script URLs or inline script content matching "/load.php?["']*modules=" (high-confidence tier); HTML structure patterns such as "class=["']["']*mw-(body|parser-output|page-title)" (medium-confidence tier); Meta tags (generator, description, og:*) matching "MediaWiki N" (medium-confidence tier); Signal weights for MediaWiki: 85 points per high-tier match, 55 per medium, 25 per low — a site needs 60+ points before MediaWiki is reported.. Each match contributes to a confidence score, and the full evidence tiers are documented at /how-scores-work.
How many websites using MediaWiki are in the database?+
We've fingerprinted 1+ live sites built with MediaWiki across our scan dataset. The list refreshes as new scans come in.
What are the typical characteristics of a MediaWiki website?+
Script URLs through /w/load.php?modules=…. `<meta name="generator" content="MediaWiki 1.x">`. Classes such as mw-body and mw-parser-output. A static landing page like wikipedia.org carries none of these
Related Tools & Technologies
Other website builders and platforms we detect
Ready to put MediaWiki detection to work?
You now know what MediaWiki is, why it matters, how to spot it, and where the detection signals come from. The next step is using that knowledge on a real URL — yours, a competitor's, or a prospect's.