[tottenhm]

I can't speak to MDN's tooling or culture, but... it sounds like the transition that many FOSS projects made from wiki-workflow docs (Confluence/Mediawiki/etc) to PR-workflow docs (ReadTheDocs/Github/mkdocs/etc).

Anecdotally, for the project where I contribute most... the issue about fewer contributors is real. But you do still get contributors, and PR-workflow makes other aspects easier (like broad clean-ups/reorgs/scheduling/versioning). For contributors who come, you also get the opportunity to socialize/engage them during review. Overall, there are drawbacks/risks, but I'd say it was a net-improvement (wrt quality/clarity of the final docs).

Maybe look at it this way: Both workflows provide a way to organize open/community docs. Both workflows have positive role-models. In both, you need capacity+interest for editing, for socialization, etc. If you tend to these, you can do good. But if there's neglect... then that's where you'll see the starkest differences:

* In wiki-workflow, the likely symptoms of neglect are draft-quality content, bad prose, quirky TOC, drive-by edits that are out-of-place, etc.

* In PR-workflow, the likely symptoms of neglect are slow review/feedback, older content, would-be contributors who can't assimilate to the workflow, etc.