This is so true.

I adopted mediawiki to run a knowledge base for my organization at Microsoft ( https://microsoft.github.io/code-with-engineering-playbook/I... ).

As I was exploring self-host options that would scale to our org size, it turned out there was already an internal team running a company wide multi-tenant mediawiki PLATFORM.

So I hit them up and a week later we had a custom instance and were off to the races.

Almost all the work that team did was making mediawiki hyper efficient with caching and cache gen, along with a lot of plumbing to have shared infra (AD auth, semitrusted code repos, etc) thst still allowed all of us “customers” to implement whatever whacky extensions and templates we needed.

I still hope that one day Microsoft will acknowledge that they use Mediawiki internally (and to great effect) and open-source the whole stack, or at least offer it as a hosted platform.

I tried setting up a production instance af my next employer - and we ended up using confluence , it was like going back to the dark ages. But I couldn’t make any reasonable financial argument against it - it would have taken a a huge lift to get a vanilla MW instance integrated into the enterprise IT environment.