MediaWiki File Format (.mediawiki): What It Is and How to Open It

MediaWiki at a glance#

Full name	MediaWiki markup
File extension	.mediawiki
Category	Documents
Developer	Wikimedia Foundation
First released	2002
MIME types	text/x-wiki
Compression	Uncompressed
FileFlip support	FileFlip reads and writes this format

What a .mediawiki file can hold#

These are the things a MediaWiki file either supports or does not, and they are what decides whether a conversion keeps everything or quietly drops something.

Selectable text	Yes
Human readable	Yes

Strengths and limitations of MediaWiki#

What MediaWiki does well

Every Wikipedia article and its full edit history is downloadable in this exact markup, through the API and the public database dumps
Compact syntax for what wikis do constantly: internal links, tables, and reusable templates
Editable directly in a browser text box, with no client software needed

Where MediaWiki falls short

Templates and transclusion, which build most of what's visible on a typical Wikipedia page (infoboxes, citations, navigation boxes), don't survive conversion, because rendering them means running MediaWiki's own template engine, not just reading text
Table markup and template parameters get tangled easily, so hand-editing anything past a simple page is fiddly
Meaningless outside a MediaWiki installation, so opening one elsewhere means running a wiki or converting it first

Keep content as MediaWiki markup while it lives on Wikipedia or another MediaWiki install, since that's the only place templates and transclusion actually render.

Convert MediaWiki markup to another format when moving an article out of a wiki for good, such as into a document or a static site, and accept that any templates it used will not expand.

How to open a .mediawiki file#

A .mediawiki file opens in the programs below, grouped by the platform you are on. If you would rather not install anything, FileFlip converts MediaWiki into a format your machine already opens, and it does it in the browser tab rather than on a server.

Platform	Programs that open it
Windows	Visual Studio Code, Notepad++
macOS	Visual Studio Code, BBEdit
Linux	Visual Studio Code, Vim, Emacs
Web	MediaWiki (any wiki install), Wikipedia's edit view, FileFlip

MediaWiki questions people ask#

What is a .mediawiki file?

A .mediawiki file holds wikitext, the plain-text markup language behind Wikipedia and any other site running MediaWiki software. It's the same syntax you'd see by clicking Edit source on a Wikipedia page: double brackets for links, equals signs for headings, and curly braces for templates.

Can I open a MediaWiki file in Word?

Word doesn't understand MediaWiki markup, so opening the raw file just shows the wikitext characters instead of formatted text. Converting it to a .docx first renders the headings, links, and tables Word does understand, though anything built from a template comes through as whatever text was left in the source rather than the rendered result.

What happens to Wikipedia templates when I convert wikitext?

MediaWiki markup expresses a template as a name inside double curly braces, and the actual content only appears once MediaWiki's own template engine expands it on its servers. A converter working from raw wikitext never sees that expansion, so infoboxes, citation templates, and navigation boxes come through as their unexpanded template calls, or get dropped entirely.

Is MediaWiki markup the same as Markdown?

No. MediaWiki markup and Markdown both use plain-text symbols for formatting, but the syntax differs in almost every detail, from how links are written to how tables and templates work, and MediaWiki markup has no direct Markdown equivalent for transclusion. A file written as one won't render correctly if opened as the other.

Converting MediaWiki files#

Every conversion runs inside your browser. The file is read from your disk, the work happens on your own machine, and nothing is uploaded. How FileFlip works names the engine behind each family and how to verify that for yourself.

MediaWiki File Format (.mediawiki)