Mark Clements wrote:
The problem is that the interface skin used by WMF projects is also the default skin in the MediaWiki software. This means that there are thousands of wikis out there that look exactly like Wikipedia et al. How is anyone (even an experienced user) supposed to realise that WikiTravel [2] is not a WMF project when it looks exactly like one? I think that the strongest thing we could do to reinforce the brand is to create a new skin that is used by WMF projects _and_only_ WMF projects, which is copyrighted/trademarked (if that is possible) and which is not included as part of the MediaWiki code.
At one point I had done this to illustrate how far we could go with just CSS and a couple of javascript tweaks.
http://mark.sdf-eu.org/wikitravel/Lausanne.html
Note that there are actually 4 skins here and you can switch between them with a little javascript. The one-column thing is meant to be for PDAs.
It works out of course that other programming priorities got in the way of implementing the skin. I've discovered the same thing with my own site:
I can barely keep up with the work I'm doing on extensions. Reskinning it is imporantant, but I have to make the site basically work before anybody's going to dream of using it.
-mark