If scale is a concern, then you want to be reducing drag as much as possible. Database lookups and edits can get expensive, so maybe just avoid them outright: DokuWiki only requires a web server with PHP. It keeps content as plain files, making it easy to serve up and to back up.

But it’s often said that perfection is when nothing can be taken away, so what if we remove PHP as well? In this case, we need the content to already be rendered HTML. And we can do that, since there’s a body of site generation packages that build from Markdown files. I found this one while randomly searching: codeberg.org/milofultz/swiki

At this point, it’s just a plain web server that dishes out static HTML files. Such simplicity will withstand most AI scrapers, because the cost per request is now absurdly low. And caching a static site is not particularly difficult. Indeed, if the sum total of the wiki content is small enough, it might even fit into something like Codeberg Pages, which means we’ve eliminated even the web server (though this would depart from c/selfhosted).

What seems to be missing from that swiki package – but is entirely feasible – would be to have all content in Markdown files and live in a Git repo, and the Git history itself is used as the Wiki history. This means your pages would retain the classic wiki change log, just that it can all be generated from a Git repo that’s small enough to keep on a floppy disk.