[Foundation-l] Design for wikipedia's front page (and corporate)

[Erik Moeller]

On 5/19/06, Austin Hair <adhair at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/19/06, Delphine Ménard <notafishz at 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