I think MediaWiki is showing its age. Some improvements could include:
- reputation system and better meta-edit controls a la StackOverflow. This could help remove some of the politics associated with Administrative rights in the current system.
- edit thresholds that increase with size/age of articles, to avoid stupid troll-based edit wars. To still allow quick reaction to news events, have a vote-based modification system to allow upvotes to overcome the threshold.
- A robust table editor to replace the monstrosity of MW tables would go a long way to improve readability.
- ... and in general, less arcane markup.
MW tables aren't really a monstrosity -- I doubt a better text editable table format that maintained the flexibility could be produced.
But yeah, there are some problematic holes in MW, especially when you consider how wikipedia is used today.
Example: How many times have you clicked on a link, to be redirected to a page that seems to have no relevance? After a few seconds, you realise it was supposed to redirect to a specific subsection, but that subsection has been removed or renamed. That is a problem that could be solved with better technology.
