> > Traditionally, more skins has created more headaches, but maybe it's > time to rethink this infrastructure [2] and encourage a more abundant > selection of skins on our wikis. From my perspective the lack of > competition in the Wikipedia skin world is preventing innovation. FWIW > I'd love to have a go at making a new skin based on Winter's ideas in > my spare time with a fixed header, but given that I have no confidence > it will ever get on the cluster I have no motivation to do this. Where > is Apex deployed for example [3]? Why can't I try this out on > Wikipedia and see if I prefer the experience?
I've heard complaints from some skin writers, that the lack of stability in MediaWiki's skin system is a major annoyance for them. I don't know how representative that view is, but redesigning the skin system every 6 months is probably not a great way to get more skins made. > > The closest thing I see to MediaWiki are Wikia wiki's and Wordpress > and both of those seem to have a much more active and healthy skin > ecosystem. Is this something we want to recreate or are we saying that > Vector is the only skin MediaWiki will ever need? If that's the case, > I'm troubled. Last I checked, Wikia was running MediaWiki, and their code was open source (albeit, with weird dependencies). Its unsurprising that wordpress is beating us in skin diversity, given the use case and how the install base of wordpress is distributed. Our skin ecosystem could probably be better, but I'm unconvinced by this comparison. I don't think its as horrible as you make it out though. I've seen plenty of wikis use skins that are not monobook/vector. > Choice is an important aspect of any open source > project. > As a general statement, that's debatable. There's plenty of open source projects that specifically try to reduce choice in order to be minimal, or meet other requirements. As far as MediaWiki, goes I'd agree that skin choice is an important goal. Its not entirely clear that that is an important goal for Wikimedia though. -- bawolff _______________________________________________ Design mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design
