On 5/19/06, Austin Hair adhair@gmail.com wrote:
On 5/19/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote:
The problem I see is that the monobook is the default design for every single Mediawiki in the world. Which means that people have trouble knowing whether they are on Wikipedia, on a mirror, or some strange fake site, or on my grand-mother's wiki.
Precisely. If you decide to install the most popular wiki software package out there, you have to go out of your way to make it *not* look like Wikipedia—at least the default logo isn't the MediaWiki flower anymore (actually, it is, but at least it's defaced by annoying text that compels people to change it quickly).
It should also be noted that the default MonoBook skin isn't even appropriate for many wikis with its book background image. I'm often disabling it on wikis I host. I support any effort towards either a new Wikimedia skin, or a new MediaWiki default skin, as long as the result is free content.
To get an idea of what is possible -- Novell makes extensive use of MediaWiki, and has made the heaviest customizations I've seen so far in the wild:
http://wiki.novell.com/ http://en.opensuse.org/ http://www.hula-project.org/ http://www.mono-project.com/
Given their strong open source commitment, they might even be interested in collaborating.
Erik