OK, so you don't offer rsync. And the closest I can get to $ du -sh med* 17M mediawiki-1.18.2.tar.gz 72M mediawiki-1.18.2 is your 99M product, which I hope you could document on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download_from_Git Apparently it involves a --bare option.
And how might one update it occasionally without accruing things I will not need. I.e., I just want to do an rsync.
Let's assume 72M mediawiki-1.23 72M mediawiki-1.24 72M mediawiki-1.25
I guess I will just have to accept some bloat with git over this. I guess there is no way to just get the same content without using git in some way that it is not intended.
P.S., I use http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Wiki_family#Ultimate_minimalist_solutio... so each additional wiki is just a symlink.