User blog comment:DaNASCAT/Introducing Service-Oriented Architecture, A New Approach to Software Development/@comment-24473195-20160829222708/@comment-24473195-20160829230415

Forking is a core principle of software development. But there are a lot of things Wikia could simply benefit by reducing the cruft it built up over the years. For example, as the previous commenter below suggested, you're slowly but surely re-implementing templatedata. You have template types which is completely template metadata, and the portable infobox aligns somewhat with what wikimedia did with their capiunto project although that seems to have stalled. In fact, portable infoboxes are mostly metadata, and they do implement a function that extracts labels to populate the template editor in VisualEditor.

Wikia and WMF are certainly different beasts with the same end goal of facilitating the creation and distribution of knowledge (for different reasons perhaps). In my estimation, a considerable amount of Wikia's development time is actually working on ways to hack things that Mediawiki developers also try to solve, thereby duplicating the effort and reinventing the wheel (e.g. the new appreciation feature -> thanks extension). On the other hand, Wikia implemented crosswiki notifications years before WMF. But now their notifications caters to more use cases than wikia's does. Anyway, end-users will always want more.

As the old song goes, if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.