* APIs with deeper functional inroads in multiple languages. There are lots of great tools for writing bots, but if you want to write a parser extension, you're stuck with PHP right? Or has that changed?
* Multiplayer. Edit conflicts can be a real pain and turnoff for beginner users. I wish that simultaneous use felt more like a collaborative social experience and less like a minefield.
...but I do think mediawiki is wonderful, and I'm inclined to use it despite these drawbacks.
Personally, I use bookstack (https://github.com/BookStackApp/BookStack) at home. Mostly because I really like the mental model of using Bookshelves, Books, Chapters and Pages to sort my notes in.
Docsify is git-backed but not a static site generator. Instead it reads the markdown as-is and renders to HTML/DOM (don't know the details) in the browser. I had 2 problems with it, first the sidebar wasn't convenient to edit/update, which I handled by creating a tags: `name` `name` annotation convention. The second was it didn't work for private github repos, which was solved by using Cloudflare Pages to auto-publish changes from git. Effectively now it has a 'build' step like a static-site-generator but it's only to write _sidebar.md from the tagged *.md files.
You can see the start of my personal wiki/notes[2] which includes some info about Docsify and Cloudflare Pages & Access (transparently login-protect http paths). Note the 'Edit' buttons (which open Github in edit mode) won't work (as you don't have access to private repo).
It depends on your use case. The simplest and oldest wiki might be Docuwiki. There is no database, and organization is based on text files in folders. You can make decent wikis with it, but it’s minimalist and can be hard for the users to use it.
Then we have enterprise solutions for collaboration by Microsoft, Google, Atlassian, etc. They can’t be used in our workplace, due to organization policy.
I went with Bookstack for a wiki to be used by a group of people. The interface and fonts are pretty, it’s super fast, installation is easy, and automatic updates have been problem free so far. The content must be organized in terms of shelves/books/chapters/pages, but some people want any number of categories and titles. It doesn’t allow a lot of customization, but the choices made are OK.
Mediawiki is complex, and takes more time to administer. It could make sense for large number of users. I stopped using it after upgrades broke the installation a few times, and, frankly, the interface looks outdated to me in most themes, and needs customization which takes time. Obviously, it’s very customizable, there are tons of resources and we know it can scale to billions of people!