The wiki is not dead.
There are a handful of issues, and to be honest this is something wthww and I need to just sit down and decide and do, but both of us have very busy lives already, so the wiki falls by the wayside.
The first is that MediaWiki has very poor user management, and that I don't want to integrate Mediawiki with Invision, for sign-ons, which we did in the distant past when we had PHPbb2. This is mostly because I'm not skilled at modern webapp/linux security or PHP tools in general and I want maintenance to be as simple as it can be.
The second is that, because of that, user management is currently totally manual. This is to prevent defacement and things like those bots that used to run around and create pages on random wikis they found online, alternatingly for storage and for advertisement/google algorithm gaming.
The third is that we got the new CMS/Forum and I wanted to use it, but as mentioned, there are some shortfalls with invision that make that difficult. I last reviewed the forum's articles functionality on a fresh local dev install in 2017, so it's worth looking again. I believe there's been a couple new feature releases since then and so it might be much better now than it was back then.
The other thing is that maintaining a wiki is less about programming and more about culture. The software itself is more or less in good standing, other than having a "dated" visual design (fine, TBH, it's there to house information, not to look pretty) and the person who built out most of the pages left a couple years ago.
I've been toying with a local copy of dokuwiki on one of my computers at home and part of what I was thinking about there was "what would make a good macdex" - thinking about how the editorial style of Low End Mac might be useful for containing relevant information or links to relevant information on a page, but keeping the formatting pretty consistent, and ideally also combining families of machines on a single page. (So there's a single "6100" page, not 12 unique pages for all the different configurations plus performa and WGS variations.)
The thread with article ideas is here:
Much of what I've put in this thread is stuff that we already have in stickies, or information that was sourced elsewhere as part of regular proceedings around the forum. jt put a handful of things in about architectures, for example. This isn't itself a comprehensive list of what needs to be done, but, more like a to-do list.
We're now entering the worst part of the year for me in terms of forum/wiki work, because I'm a local organizer for nanowrimo, and in november I'll be doing that and writing a novel, so I'm likely to cut back on forum time a lot.
So, overall:
- The wiki is in a technically sound state
- Protecting MediaWiki from vandalism amounts to either constantly reverting changes and deleting spam pages, or manually managing users
- User management in mediawiki is bad. I would argue it's outright broken.
- We need to see if Invision has gotten better enough
- The issue isn't programming or programmers per se, but rather: people willing to author, edit, source, and organize content, plus deciding what projects we as a community want to handle. For example, is it worth our time building or maintaining a "macdex" when there are already so many of them out there?
- If we move to a new system, we will likely need/want people to review the existing content and re-author it for the new system. As part of that process, we should probably give consideration to what articles can be removed.
Again, other than deciding what to do and then doing it, the most important thing, the thing we'll need the most hands involved in, is going to be migrating and/or writing content, most of which will involve transcribing forum posts.
The long game is to build interest in the wiki as a community project, and not just as "so-and-so's" project. The gotcha here has always been scenarios where people wanted complete control over a particular page, or just failure in general to get people interested in the idea of a wiki, especially from back before we had to cut down on post editing. *(Most of our stickied posts are from when all users had indefinite edit capabilities, for example.)
