I’ve had a look at what is possible without too much fuzz:
- change the logo of the Python wiki to include the word “wiki” and have it point to the FrontPage of the wiki instead of back to the python.org website
- add a single line header introducing the wiki and also pointing to the FrontPage for instructions.
- add some minimal CSS to improve the mobile readability of the wiki (similar to what Simon suggested in the mobile thread)
Since the moin wiki software does not use templating for rendering the pages, more involved changes are not easily possible without forking the code base.
Regarding the tech itself: Yes, it’s definitely old and cranky in a few places, but it’s been running mostly fine for many many years, so it’s not necessarily something which requires an urgent change.
One way to improve the tech would be to move to a different wiki engine and migrate the content over.
I’m not aware of any other Python based wiki solution, but there are a few PHP based wikis which may work. Just a word of warning: the wiki has 3000+ pages and 30k+ users, so scalability certainly is one of the factors which would need to be take into account. Each page typically has a number of revisions (the wiki works much like a git repo), so there’s also a ton of history information which would need to be ported.
The alternative would be to have the PSF issue a grant to the MoinMoin2 team to speed up getting it into shape to host the Python wiki. The project is still ongoing, but only very slowly… https://liberapay.com/MoinMoin