http://www.emacswiki.org/cw?TooManyWikiEngines

There's tons of different WikiEngines http://wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/WikiEngine (or WikiClones http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/latin-1.pl?url=http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?WikiClone) out there. This provides a vibrant diversity of ideas, but it also means that the sum total of wiki developer effort is split into 1000 pieces.

One aspect of the problem is that in order to try out a few new features, often a developer simply forks a WikiEngine. The different wiki engines are like lots of small tidepools, each of them with a few unique features, most features being stuck to their WikiEngine.

Similarly, it is hard for a new feature or a new WikiEngine to be adopted by many wiki communities; wiki communities are "stuck" with their current wiki engine, because it is hard to move the content to a new one.

My personal effort to improve the situation is not to try and get convince people to stop forking wikis, but instead to create tools which make the situation more fluid. Tools to allow new features to flow more easily from one WikiEngine to another. And to allow WikiEngines to fluidly flow into one another. Another word for "fluidity" here is probably "interoperability".