Doesn't mean everybody will. Wikipedia is a weird special-case. I've contributed once to MDN, ever, and I use it all the time.

Also if the team that was supporting it is gone, will the deployment just bit rot and die?

I'm not even sure I want everyone contributing, at least not without some pruning.

Sparse documentation is better than wrong documentation.

I've never come across a page on MDN I felt I could contribute to since it's so complete, but if I were to come across out of date docs I absolutely would. I imagine it's similar for a lot of folks.

MDN has some Python tutorials that are of lesser quality than HTML,CSS,JS MDN docs.

Those could use some work.

Usually there are only a handful percents of overall users who actually create content compared to "read-only" users. There is nothing special about wikipedia, the same thing applies for sites like youtube,reddit, etc. The same will apply for MDN as well, so if you haven't contributed there, this doesn't mean that nobody will.

>Wikipedia is a weird special-case.

Is it?

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7x47bb/wikipedia-editors-...

This is the nature of any community platform [0]. Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them, and aren't interested in becoming heavily active. I don't see Wikipedia as special in this case, it's just so large that the 1% has enough critical mass to maintain it (well, mostly).

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_(Internet_culture)

>Most people will just fix small issues they see or contribute a little in an area that appeals to them

Wikipedia makes this very difficult as well. I had to submit a small update to sales numbers for the best-selling video game franchises of all time THREE times because two separate admins reverted my edits for the most stupid reasons possible. Then they had some hand-wringing about the lack of sources (even though most of the data there wasn't sourced any better) before they stubbornly decided to stop reverting my edits. A less stubborn person would've given up editing Wikipedia after the first or even the second reversion.

But e.g. Google teams working on web specs do at least. But I don't have data how the contributions are split, and maintenance is of course a concern.

Is the source data openly available, though? You can't exactly "fork" a wiki, normally. I'm concerned lots of crucial knowledge would be lost if Mozilla decided not to host it any more.

Many wikis, MDN included, have all content under an open license, and even run open-source software, and thus can be forked if necessary.

But is the content made readily available in the original markup (wiki markup, markdown, whatever), or would you have to scrape everything from the website? Wiki content is normally stored in a database, and presumably that database isn't just open to the world to query directly

Many wikis have open APIs (e.g. mediawiki instances typically do). Not sure about MDNs custom thing, but scraping is always an alternative - or even working off one of the HTML dumps available for offline use (although loosing history and original format sucks).

Theoretically since you can edit the original-format content from the website, you could scrape it from the website. I'm just wondering if this is something anybody is thinking about/working on.