Welcome in the DokuWiki community! If you haven't found our
getting involved wiki page yet I suggest to read it. I don't know what kind of wiki for researchers you want to build but I can definitely recommend having a look at the
Researchr project which is DokuWiki-based system for documenting research as "open scholar".
Apart from that I can only second what Sam has suggested, plugins are definitely a good way to start contributing to DokuWiki/the DokuWiki community.