They are a free wiki host run by a UK non-profit, pretty much the only free wiki host that has no ads whatsoever and also offers a reasonable selection of Mediawiki extensions. There are thousands, but some examples of popular wikis hosted on Miraheze:
- A ton of amateur wikis that migrated from Fandom (formerly Wikia) after a series of poor decisions by Fandom, such as the Polandball Wiki: https://www.polandballwiki.com/
- MOGAI Wiki, a continuation of some of the gender and sexual identities wikis from Fandom. There was a huge debacle where fandom tried to forcibly merge various superficially similar wiki communities, which caused a lot of chaos for LGBT wikis due to disagreement over xenogenders. https://mogai.miraheze.org/wiki/MOGAI_Wiki
It’s probably not just about money but also the fact you have to pick your administrators from the pool of people willing to deal with the interpersonal drama and legal headaches that come with those projects.
So that would be people looking for a captive audience and that’s typically for a reason.
I only knew about it because a popular mod Space Exploration for the video game Factorio has its wiki hosted on it. Actually even then I never went up to miraheze.org to look at the rest of the site.
media wiki's a particularly complicated thing to host and I don't think there's anything else quite like MiraHeze currently. It's been used by everything from video game wikis to casual conlangers to even some state governments so I'd say it's a pretty big deal
That's true only because mediawiki is designed for the infrastructure of a previous era, and massively overengineered for these kinds of use cases. Use any of the many free solutions for hosting a free site now. Use tiddlywiki in a single file for 99%+ of wikis. Or any linked markdown system. Making sites for small communities is easier than ever but harder to discover due to noise. That doesn't make mediawiki good.
