Today I stumbled upon a couple of URLs leading to beautiful MediaWiki deployments:

http://vimeo.com/57671929 as a showcase of http://www.seizam.com/

https://github.com/OSAS/strapping-mediawiki skin, seen in action at http://www.ovirt.org/ (via http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/2013/01/18/awesome-mediawiki-theme/ )

I have contacted both authors to see if some of that beauty could land in mediawiki.org as links, documentation, contributions...

Then again, with landing pages like

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Skins

I can see why we don't even attract those designers spending long hours making our software look and feel great.

Anybody willing to step in and start working on a better landing surface for MediaWiki designers? It is a great opportunity for someone with good taste willing to start contributing. I can help.