Are search results getting worse? Yes, they are. Also, Marginalia is quite nice. Maybe I should give it a go as my main search engine?

I have been responsible for the MediaWiki installation on https://wiki.openttd.org/ from ~2005 till 2020. One thing became clear: it is very difficult to keep it up-to-date and to find quality extensions that live for more than a few years.

So, we set out to find an alternative. With the experience we have had with for example BaNaNaS we ideally would like to store all the data in git. This is mostly as data in git is easier for more people to maintain, then a database where very few people have access to. Also, the wiki of OpenTTD was not big enough (~5000 pages) to really need a database to support it. As extra bonus, we would favour any system that could easily be cached.

The software closest to this is gollum. Although gollum appears to do exactly what we want, especially as wikitext is supported via WikiCloth, reality turned out to be something else. Although it does support wikitext, or a subset thereof, it does not support templates. This is a huge issue for any real wiki, as templates make a wiki of any decent size possible. Initially we did hack in support for templates, but as it is written in Ruby, not a language any of the people involved knew sufficiently to make any decent contribution, it only added more issues than it resolved. In the end, it was decided this was not a road to go.

A friendly programming language from the future.

The big idea behind Unison is that its functions are hashed and content-addressed.