Trevor Parscal tparscal@wikimedia.org writes:
95% is pretty extreme.
Not according to WikiApiary. The largest host for wikis, even before Wikimedia, is DreamHost followed closely by GoDaddy and other shared hosters such as 1&1.[1]
Yes, Amazon and Linode are also near the top of the list, but from experience, I can tell you that most of those aren't using anything but PHP, and, if you're lucky, the Math and Scribunto extensions.
Even the most asked-for service of the SOA -- Parsoid for Visual Editor -- is almost (but not quite) exclusively on WMF wikis.[2]
Developers within an organisation like the WMF don't have to worry about what it takes to stand up and maintain a wiki -- they have Operations for that.
Most people running wikis based on MediaWiki don't have a budget or a staff exclusively for their wiki. They don't have the resources or knowledge to run a dedicated server.
There are things that can be done to address this -- make it easier to set up a SOA-using wiki on your chosen virtual machine provider -- but they need dedicated resources.
This probably means a really dedicated (group of) volunteer(s) or a new focus on non-WMF use of MediaWiki by the WMF. This seems to be the direct result of the the decisions made by developers who've implemented some very compelling features without (as Robla seemed to say recently) any overall architectural direction.
Mark.
Footnotes: [1] https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Host:Hosts
[2] https://wikiapiary.com/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor