MediaWiki is very powerful wiki software that sucks to administer and host and is part of the reason we're creating WeWrite, to make wikis suck less. So annoying is it to administer that Fandom and Miraheze exist as hosting sites.
Good things about MediaWiki
Good tool for thinking, building ideas in public, and having thousands of fellow collaborators
Bad things
I need to keep restructuring this section as it's not very well-organized
Spend all of your time googling error messages
Hosting: People who want to start wikis shouldn't have to think about web hosting. Spinning up a wiki should be as easy as writing in Apple Notes or posting a Tweet.
Thanks to the Miraheze folks for taking away the nightmare of hosting for me on this documentation wiki.
Social: On MediaWiki, the Discussion / Talk pages which are poorly designed both from a UI perspective as well as from a software perspective (they occupy a Talk: namespace on MediaWiki, ghetto as hell)
Currently, no normal person sets up a personal wiki for fun. If anything, some people might create a blog. More people will post to social media. I contend that if normies all had their own wiki, and they all were workshopping their long-form writings in public, I think the world would be a better place.
In general, MediaWiki is ghetto as hell. Categories don't work well, image support is kinda goofy, you gotta install a WYSIWYG editor (VisualEditor) so you can get out of the hell of the wiki markup language
The fact that there's tons of skins for MediaWiki just shows that everyone hates the core user experience and wishes it was less bad. There are no skins for Apple Notes. Because Apple Notes is simple and usable.