On 15 July 2013 15:40, bawolff <bawolff+wn@gmail.com> wrote:

I feel like the best time to do that would have been when vector was
being released. We could have easily kept the default MediaWiki skin
as monobook, and had vector as the default for WMF wikis. Some people
would want their wikis to look like Wikimedia's, but realistically
most people setting up MediaWiki just go with the default.

That was explicitly mentioned as a goal when the UsabilityInitiative was kicked off, but the opportunity got lost along the way when Vector was added to the tarball as the default skin. However, I agree with Daniel that there are ethical issues about keeping back the improvements made just for look-and-feel differential - possibly this could be done with a different default colour scheme?

--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforrester@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester