I'm skeptical about this. A small wiki doesn't really need the complexity of Scribunto for maintaining templates, it just makes the potential maintainer base smaller (there are way more people who can deal with complex wikitext than who can code in Lua). Borrowing Wikipedia templates seems easy, but in practice those templates tend to be so complicated that they often don't perform so well on a site with a simple setup like Wikispore.

Note 1. Scribunto is bundled in MediaWiki defaultly 2. One of the original purpose is to provide a library of string functions 3. Wikibase needs Scribunto to work.

Also users can still use wikitext template even if it is installed.

There is little point in installing Wikibase as long as it does not support web-based federation. (See T231897: Connect Wikispore to Wikidata for discussion.)

We need to reuse existing Wikipedia template (so that content can copy back-and-forth). See also https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/wiki/Greenhouse#Importers, which a large number of templates is proposed to be imported.

The point is, I suspect that will be unfeasible anyway, because many enwiki templates would render unbearably slow on a less beefy server. Shouldn't be hard to test that on wikispore-test though.

Another usage is handling data in Cargo: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Cargo/Other_features#Lua_support

For example, filtering amd further formatting.

In many times, Lua modules behave better - this is why we introduce Lua. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Scripting

And also, https://wikispore.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Citation/core&action=edit is very difficult to read and maintain.

Without Scribunto we will require more than 100 subtemplates of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Convert which is much more difficult to maintain.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:Mbabel-Museum&action=edit for yet another unreadable template.

+1 to the comments above

I've added Scribunto to the Wikispore Vagrant patch: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/c/mediawiki/vagrant/+/546156

I've been experimenting with a module: https://wikispore-test.wmflabs.org/wiki/Template:Wikidata_link

I think once the current site config has propagated to production, this can be closed.