On 15/06/07, Monahon, Peter B. Peter.Monahon@uspto.gov wrote:
Cary wrote: ... monobook is getting old ... and it's marginally relevant to Wikimedia Commons ... so similar to many of the projects that it's not ... easy to tell that you've moved from one wiki to another ... But not all of us are good at designing skins ... how do we change it while upsetting the least amount of people? I propose ... a contest to come up with a new, more exciting monobook.css ... -C
One interesting thing that the Wikimedia brand survey [1] threw up in my mind, was the use of the MediaWiki skin within Wikimedia projects.
The problem is that the interface skin used by WMF projects is also the default skin in the MediaWiki software. This means that there are thousands of wikis out there that look exactly like Wikipedia et al. How is anyone (even an experienced user) supposed to realise that WikiTravel [2] is not a WMF project when it looks exactly like one? I think that the strongest thing we could do to reinforce the brand is to create a new skin that is used by WMF projects _and_only_ WMF projects, which is copyrighted/trademarked (if that is possible) and which is not included as part of the MediaWiki code.
Rather than allowing WMF projects to start customising the skin to make them all look different, they should have a WMF skin that makes them all identifiably _related_ (though not necessarily _identical_) and which clearly separates them from the thousands of other unrelated projects that also use monobook.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_brand_survey [2] http://www.wikitravel.org/