QUOTE(Zoloft @ Tue 8th March 2011, 10:48am)
Ultimately, if MediaWiki fails to move away from PHP, this by itself could be what kills Wikipedia.
Jimmy Wales, and by extension Wikimedia, is far too conservative to "gamble" on a platform change at this late stage of the game. In Wikipedia's ten years there has been almost no functional or technical change in the Wikipedia platform. Contrast Facebook, whose current platform bears absolutely no technical resemblance and fairly little functional resemblance to what it was like when it premiered.