While I agree that a mediawiki solution is ideal because it's built to be a wiki, there are a significant number of issues with a mediawiki solution:
- Requires a server to host it on ($$$)
- Requires one or more people to maintain the server (time + commitment)
- Ideally, requires a domain name ($$$)
- Someone has to keep out the spammers, maintain the quality of content (even ChiefDelphi has spammers, and it is a non-zero amount of work to keep them out)
- Still have to reconstruct the content, Brandon lost the backups
- And finally, nobody has actually done it yet
If you can solve all of those problems, then a FIRSTwiki can use a mediawiki solution. However, the history of the prior FIRSTwiki shows that this is easier said than done, otherwise it would still exist today.
For the constraints that we have, github pages works great:
- No server required
- Zero server maintenance
- Free subdomain
- Github takes care of spammers for us
- I've already done a lot of the initial hard work
Finally, one big advantage is because the content is stored in git, anyone can fork and rehost FIRSTwiki if they so desire.
I'm firmly convinced that with a little bit of web design and javascript magic, the ease of use problems can be overcome with a github pages based wiki (after all, github provides APIs to allow content editing, just need something to write to those). It would take some work, but CMS solutions like prose.io show it can be done (though, prose.io isn't a good fit for us). I won't be able to get to it for awhile, but perhaps a motivated web developer can do it.