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Wikimedia adopted Wikibase (aka Wikidata) instead to fill that niche.

SemanticMediaWiki has some questionable scalability when it comes to large sites. Wikimedia was never going to adopt it for technical reasons.

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I've build a few Semantic MediaWikis in my past and share the concern about scalability. But also be aware that in many cases you might not need such a scalability like managing semantic data for all of Wikimedias major wikis in different languages. For small to medium sized companies or communities, I think SMW can scale well enough - depending on how you use it.

The advantage of SMW imho is still that it brings the semantic / structured data features right into the MediaWiki itself and that there's a big ecosystem of related extensions around it (like Page Forms). So far I don't know of an open-source information management system which comes close in capability to this. Setting this all up and maintaining it is difficult, though - I even had to start developing custom tools to assist me with that once it got more complex.

I mean, I'd agree. Most people do not operate at scale, and prematurely optimizing for a scale that most people will never reach is a bad idea.

However if we're talking about Wikipedia, any scaling concerns at all basically make it a non-starter.

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