On 2 Jul 2003, at 20:43, The Cunctator wrote:

...

My reasoning for this was that Wikipedia has two uses:

• a work of reference
• a collaborative editing system used by us.

We need to find the right balance between making editing easy and making reading Wikipedia unobtrusive. Some work on this is being done in the Skin department, for example, where we will probably end up with a Skin preferred by editors, and one that is more friendly to non-editing users.

This would be a terrible violation of the basic Wiki-nature of Wikipedia.

A "reader" skin wouldn't make it hard for people to edit; it would just keep things as simple and uncluttered as possible, with navigation tools and an "Edit this page" link. The complicated stuff would be tucked out of sight. If you want to argue wiki-nature, I'd say this simple skin would be more "wiki" than our current cluttered, full-featured and somewhat confusing interfaces.

- Stephen G. ------- Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia http://www.wikipedia.org