To copyright and then lock up a skin on a wiki, specifically one released under the GPL, is very silly. I feel that if that were to happen, many people would lose faith in Wikipedia and in wikis as a whole.
Kasimir
On 6/15/07, Mark Clements gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
"Rob Church" robchur@gmail.com wrote in message news:e92136380706151806u7193ecffub4de3411b48285c2@mail.gmail.com...
On 16/06/07, Angela beesley@gmail.com
wrote:
don't look like Wikipedia. To many people wiki=wikipedia and they don't understand why a wiki would not look like that. It's not only an
The "wiki" == "wikipedia" thing is a bigger problem, of course. :)
issue of design, but of branding. People associate the monobook skin with a professional, neutral site and they want their wiki to have that same branding.
Ick. Too many goddamn wikis using Monobook these days. Where's the
creativity?
Well, monobook looks pretty good. It's a nice layout and easy to navigate. I remember the excitement when it was introduced - suddenly we look like a proper website, rather than a relic from arpanet.
Given that monobook is the only skin in MediaWiki that looks even slightly professional and modern, and given that it isn't particularly obvious how to create a new skin, it is no wonder that it is so prevalent. For the general public that use MediaWiki (i.e. non-WMF sites) some kind of style editor as described here would be a great tool and would hopefully alleviate the monotonybook woes. I'm not sure what, if any, benefit it has to WMF though.
However, I think if WMF introduced a _very good_ new skin for their wikis then it would only be a positive thing! It shouldn't be a big departure though - same basic page layout, but new imagery/colours.
- Mark Clements (HappyDog)
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