User blog comment:Sarah Manley/Beyond the Encyclopedia - A Wiki for Everyone/@comment-761251-20100830231756/@comment-473563-20100901034331

Airhogs, please don't be offended by my "generation gap" comment. The real emphasis was intended to be on lackluster content and not the age of the contributor or even the grammatical correctness of a sentence/paragraph/article.

Encouraging contributions from the kind of user who is either too lazy or too ignorant to first read a page (or two) and thereby learn about just who the contributor-base are at any given wiki is perfectly fine in some cases but it is not perfectly fine in all cases.

Sarah et al,

The presumption Wikia are making by forcing the adoption of this innovative/evolved/contemporary new look at all wikis hosted by wikia is the real problem - not the Oasis skin per se.

I very much respect the problem that supporting three skins (Monobook, Monaco and Oasis) is harder than supporting two skins (Monobook and Oasis) but you know ... we have never been shown the post-mortem report on Monaco have we?

It might have been fine if we were told "Mea culpa ... we made a mistake with Monaco! It was bad for these reasons and Oasis is addressing each point in the following ways." but no such analysis has been shared.

Many potentially ground breaking features of monaco never even gained momentum. One specific feature I am thinking of right now is the Widget. That feature and especially the WidgetDashboard had HUGE potential that was simply never tapped. There were a few shortcomings that were ironed out and a few more that might have been ironed out if the skin were to remain supported.


 * To say that Monobook is supported is misleading at best and dishonest at worst.
 * A skin can only be claimed to be supported if the admin of a wiki can specify that skin as the default skin any visitor will see when browsing that wiki.
 * If Monaco was dropped AND Monobook was made a configurable default site-wide choice for any given wiki then I would gladly focus my efforts on a Monobook based skin rather than an Oasis based skin.

Wikia staff ought to be praised for being the inconspicuous plumber or engineer who keeps the important infrastructure or building block features from becoming blocked or stalled. Instead what we seem to be seeing is Wikia staff assuming too much responsibility for the presentation style instead of leaving that to each community of contributors.

That failing is most likely due to Wikia management using the wrong metrics for measuring success.

The pre-occupation with such trivia as the number of edits a user has made is one example of a myopic metric. No doubt the rank and file at Wikia are simply responding to whatever metric management have mandated.

I have huge respect for the likes of Sannse and Uberfuzzy and I have growing respect for Sarah who is, comparatively speaking, the new kid on the block. It must be tough, though, to stand up to management and point out where the wrong decisions are being made in the name of improving a flawed set of metrics.