+ Automatic translation of discussions is essential, tangibly useful for our communities, and very satisfying.
--> how can we bring this to Mediawiki? This is a core question for community health, movement development, and tech. It is a straightforward concept, not exclusive to Discourse, and we should learn from it.
I filed
T309920 a while ago, it has some technical details. IMO it's doable (although things usually turn out harder than they look when they have to be built on top of an unstructured soup of wikitext, but AIUI the Editing team has done some great foundational work to make MediaWiki discussion pages more manageable, so maybe these days that's less of an issue) but it would be a largish project that would have to be slotted into the WMF's annual planning.
+ Forum threading and features (tags, emotes) are nice, beloved by some.
They aren't "nice", they are essential for scaling discussion. Just like you can't manage thousands of articles without some kind of category system, you can't manage thousands of discussions without some kind of tagging system. And likes or reacjis allow scaling up the number of participants without excluding anyone from the discussion who is unwilling to spend several hours a day on reading new comments - they both cut down on the number of comments, and allow software to highlight the most important or most representative comments.
--> how might we support integrating discourse into a) mediawiki, b) interwiki links? (so that a forum post could link to m:Power_structure, and a meta post could link to f:Wikischool)
MediaWiki is concept-addressable; forum software aren't because they need to deal with more and messier content. You could have something with like f:123 but I'm not sure it adds value over plain links.
– Wikimedia Space was closed after a year, and its links no longer resolve.
I apologize for that. Space needs to be migrated from Debian Stretch to Buster as part of a generic upgrade of Wikimedia Cloud infrastructure. I volunteered to do it but it turned out to be non-straightforward, or possibly I've been going at it wrong, I ran out of time, and then kinda forgot about it. I'll try to wrap it up soon.
--> how can we add discourse into current versioning + archiving workflows?
A good question regardless! There was some discussion in
T235235, but it didn't go far.
See also
T262275, which is about a different Discourse site (which I didn't think was worth keeping up), but it shows a minimal-effort solution for keeping discussion content available and links working in perpetuity, although in a rather ugly format.