Your point is well-taken. I was in conversation with one of the founders/admins over at the 250.org site before I decided to start ninjette.org. Their wiki is simply great. I can't stand their forum area. If they just changed over to vbulletin and reloaded the forum, it really would be hard to compete with. But they are convinced that their users are happy with the current format and have no plans to change it. Ever.
So ninjette.org came to be. I'm convinced vBulletin is the way to go for all large well-run forums. I've come to believe this after using the original Tivo boards, Bay Area Riders Forum, ADVrider, and others. So we use it here at ninjette.org.
One thing that forums aren't great for out of the box is a wiki-type format. They are much better for conversation-type communication. So we've tried to do a few things to make up for that. For all of the technical DIY threads, I've created an index at the top of the new-gen tech area. That will get more and more complete over time. But for a general technical wiki, I think that the way to go may be to gather information over time in the standard thread format, then link them afterwards once we have a critical mass.
I don't want to create a stand-alone wiki that doesn't integrate with the vbulletin search engine, user database, or even general format. It must be seamless and intuitive. I installed the Blog product on this site to see if it would work as a Wiki-like feature, but after playing with it a bit I don't think that's necessarily the way to go. I'll continue to look at ways to do it, and as the content builds up on its own in the tech sections here, once there is a technical solution we should be able to link them together effectively.
The goal of ninjette.org wasn't initially to create the ultimate tech resource, it was to create a ninjette community. But there's no reason that it can't be both at some point. We just have to keep in mind that the wiki we like so much has been over 10 years in the making.