The Wikipedia Foundation uses the Wikipedia-content-model (fast development, mass-review) also for continuous software integration for the mediawiki version running the Wikipedias.
It used to be possible for other sites to benefit from this. Starting with mediawiki 1.16, this was given up and the continuous integration separated into the wmf branches. Since then the choice seems to be a highly unstable development only version or traditional yearly volumes of "stable" but completely out of date releases.
Testing of the current 1.17wmf shows that this version contains is indeed very hard to re-use and after several bug reports I was advised not to use the wmf software.
The alternative 1.17, released in June 2011, lacks much functionality that is already well known from Wikipedias: No WikiLove, no working ArticleFeedback or UploadWizard (the 1.17 "stable" version of the upload wizards says "This extension is currently experimental and almost certainly won't work for you (yet). We anticipate having a working version in late October / early November 2010"). Many more current Wikipedia feature are highly dated in the stable version. All these features are available in the 1.17wmf, but this version is built so it works only on wmf servers (e.g., the database updates in maintenance are disabled).
I submit this bug in the hope of initiating a thought process, whether this has to be so. I understand all of lack of time, resource constraints, ...
Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement