Yes, this is the unfortunate reality. It happens to the best of software as it ages. The article doesn't address the elephant in the room: MediaWiki is really the _only_ solution to a difficult problem that we have today. Which other markup language is so comprehensive? Yes, it's unnecessarily complicated, but let's understand that the constraints are very tight: the data can't be separated out of the markup, and it's impossible to make backward-incompatible changes. Many of the really great pages on Wikipedia render beautifully.<p>It's untrue that they haven't added features over the years: they have, but they do it at a glacial pace. Consider one of the recent ones: when you hover over a link, a box pops up and shows a preview. They used to render math on the client-side, but now, they just convert to SVG: as a result, it loads instantly, and renders consistently. The WYSIWIG editor rollout was slow, because people felt that it would attract low-quality low-commitment edits. They first released it as an optional feature, and then turned it on by default, when they were confident that it worked as intended. Oh, and my favorite? Allowing an article to start with a lower-cased word (say iOS); I remember that there were a bunch of redirects just to correct for this deficiency.<p>Yes, it is a giant pain to edit some pages in that arcane syntax, but nothing else even comes close in terms of features.<p>Yes, there are an enormous number of templates, but in practice, an infrequent contributor just finds a page that uses a similar template, and copies it out.<p>Yes, there are lots of bots, and they try very hard to guard against spam, without making you sign up or even solve a CAPTCHA to edit. Plenty of bot edits are "good" edits: they revert rage-rewrites, rage-deletions, and all kinds of malicious user behavior.<p>What you don't understand about redirects is that, the good ones can't be automated. It's not a string-matching problem. Yes, they could automate /some/ of the redirects, and they try. I've personally never run into a typo-redirect in recent years.<p>Yes, it can get political at times, and it's _very_ difficult to have objective guidelines about which pages are worthy of existing. Politicians' pages often get locked, when there's an upcoming election, and this means that you need an account to edit. Again, MW has lots of great features.<p>Wikipedia is aging, and nobody can deny that, but who would want to do the thankless work of parsing the markup and porting it to another system, AND correct the breakages? What commercial value does it have, and who's going to fund it?