I'm not sure I buy this. Why is MediaWiki so special that it can't exist inside of a package? Is MediaWiki such a special piece of software that it's impossible to build a good package?
It's "special". It isn't necessarily the fault of the distro or the package maintainer for the quality of the packages. It is our fault. Upgrading is unreliable for a number of reasons. It is definitely unreliable enough that I wouldn't trust a package to do it for me, and I can't reasonably recommend it for anyone else either.
I think user education is going to be even more futile than package maintainer education. The allure of running a system like Debian or Fedora is the ability to have pre-vetted software running in a configuration designed to work as part of a system. I'm not here to start a debate about whether they are successful in achieving that, but it's clearly a popular enough notion that an education effort to counter that probably won't have much of an impact with anyone beyond the Slackware community.
+1 for package maintainer education (as frustrating and unproductive as it might be thusfar)
I think it would be better if we provided the packages. If we fix our upgrade issues, I'll be more than happy to write rpms and debs.
Respectfully,
Ryan Lane