User blog comment:Susanolivia/Fixed Width, Sidebar, and the Removal of Monaco/@comment-3139726-20101020173231/@comment-1899984-20101026203742

"And we could go in circles about how important the fixed width is. The fact is, most wiki farms do use the fixed width, but they are not MediaWiki based, because there is no other MediaWiki-based commercial wiki farm that is close to the size of Wikia. It is therefore difficult to place the kind of direct comparison you are asking for."

Which is my point. This kind of change may be acceptable on sites that aren't nearly as large as Wikia as a whole but it is not so here.

"Of course, I am fully aware that this is far from being the only design issue. However, in my opinion, they are merely readjustments, not downgrades. Yes, there are fewer links in the sidebar. But that might mean that every link in that sidebar has greater prominence and is less likely to be glanced over. Yes, you no longer have a direct link to recent changes by default. But it's so easy for advanced users to add this to "My Tools" that it shouldn't be an issue."

Readjustment would mean that all functionality has remained just moved, which simply is not true. Thus is why this is a downgrade. The maximum 4 options for the former-sidebar is a good example of that. On my gaming wiki (which is now dead thanks to oasis), we could not possibly condense the number of primary options in the sidebar without making it far more difficult to find specific sections (people would "glance over" many things, if shrunk any further). Prominence, really? It's simply impossible to shrink the content of a gaming wiki that deals with a MMO down to 4 options. Greater Prominence at the cost of orphaning more than half of a site is ludicrous.