Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-22224-20180521161500/@comment-24155515-20180524185836

Tupka217 wrote: 84.28.17.155 wrote: The entire 1% of the users using monobook thing is a fallacy without any further elaboration. Everyone knows that users got automatically switched to horrible skins from time to time. Most inactive users will therefore have Wikia skin.

The only thing that will convince me is a real analysis. F.e. if in the top 10% editors, 40% use monobook, while in the bottom 10%, 0,01% use monobook, this change will be no more than pure economics: serving the newbies who click on the ads while presenting a big middle finger to those who actually built up this site.

And that statistic is problematic as well.

"The site" that's built up is actually "a collection of thousands of sites mostly unrelated in content". It's a very diverse place.

And with so many different platforms across Wikia, "top 10% editors" is an impossible to organize group. If, hypothetically, a user makes 2000 edits a day on a wiki about their OCs, would that really make them part of "those who built up this site"? Whereas someone who writes one chapter, episode, issue or level recap per week on a popular franchise would not have the number of edits for the arbitrary top 10%, but does "build the site up" considerably more.

Wikia tried it with Powerusers, but that didn't work. There's no subjective way to quantify a top user across all platforms.

Not to mention bots and similar "I don't edit from a 'normal' browser" cases can throw it off. (Bots especially, since they can make lots of edits very quickly and could therefore pollute the count if bot-flagged users are included (or even if they're not, since you don't need the flag to operate a bot, just to get certain rights).)

I switched my bot to Monobook when I had to manually get into its account once, but I usually sic my bot on the wiki I admin by using AWB, which means if I'd never switched skins then it'd have Oasis in its preferences, despite me technically not accessing the wiki in either skin with that account.

(Actually, now that I think about it, I think it might be possible to track whether a user is using AWB, but... hmm...)