User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-3139726-20101020173231/@comment-1025281-20101026230546

You don't keep things the way they are because they seem too big or too difficult to change. If other websites are using a fixed width to great effect, then it makes sense that Wikia, even if it may be painful, should follow suit.

I note that fixed width is not the ideal way to design websites. In an ideal world, we wouldn't have fixed widths, and people would design to accommodate different web users. However, on Wikia, with a lot of people without expertise in web design, it is far better to go for a second-best solution by fixing widths than to not do so and let the ignorant design truly inaccessible templates and designs.

Having fewer links on a sidebar does not orphan half your articles; neither does it reduce your site navigation. There is plenty of evidence for this. I refer to the biggest example of a wiki on the planet - Wikipedia - who only has eleven links for navigation that could be reasonably considered to be an equivalent of the new WIkia 28-link menu. That wiki has 3,000,000 articles. Yours has 767. Even mine has 2,600 articles, and we are doing just fine with the new menu.