On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 1:00 AM, Jon Robson <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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?

mediawiki.org is in the cluster and, as I learned in the past weeks, experimentation with optional skins should be fine there. It's a first step.

S and I are in the process of requesting the availability of the Blueprint skin as optional and experimental in mediawiki.org -- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93613. Having Apex (and/or Bluesky, Foreground, etc) joining the party would be very useful.

Whenever a new "unsolicited redesign" (not the most welcoming and encouraging term) shows up, we quickly point out to problems such design would suffer in real use. However, it is not easy at all to polish the problems a MediaWiki skin might go through without enabling it in a real wiki with real users and a real collection of various extensions.

More skins available in mediawiki.org would bring movement and progress to Vector and friends. If a skin wins adoption and excitement in mediawiki.org, it will be a matter of time that other projects will request it as equally optional and experimental. This might be a motivation for designers and frontend developers currently frustrated with discussions like this one, to work on Vector or its alternatives.

Quim Gil
Engineering Community Manager @ Wikimedia Foundation
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil