Mediawiki as This Website
Why MediaWiki
First, some background techical info. University of Rochester, CS Department has a shared website hosting service for all grad students and faculty member, powered by Apache 2 and supports PHP. The webroot itself appears to be mounted on an NFS drive. These factors majorly influenced my decision to use MediaWiki as the backend. Let's break down bit by bit.
I could have used a Static Site Generator (SSG) or even plain HTML, but decided against them since I would need a machine with the department network access to publish any changes. This limits my options to write
The fact that there's only Apache/PHP with an NFS folder accessible means that there is no database available and no backends like Node. This rules out most WordPress, BookStack, Wiki.JS, etc.
(WIP)