I do agree with David Gerard's assessment, though. We need to make sure that whatever we use is going to work with package management tools that Debian and Redhat and the like already use.
The other reason is, of course, making the distro versions of MediaWiki not suck.
A great place to start would be the SMW Bundle: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Semantic_Bundle
Oh man, if I could apt-get that my life would be way easier. (Looking into the future when there's a current, maintained, not-insane MediaWiki in Debian/Ubuntu.)
With the exception of phpMyAdmin, I don't think I've ever seen a piece of PHP software that you could really just apt-get and have easily installed. So this is definitely a worthy goal to pursue.
I too would love it if I could set up a simple Wiki on an Ubuntu/Debian box by typing "apt-get install mediawiki mediawiki-extension-XYZ mediawiki-extension-ZYX".
Thank you, Derric Atzrott