User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Community Contract for the New Fandom Platform/@comment-31448629-20190629175206/@comment-5645428-20190630042822

In addition to the updated MediaWiki version, the announcement also implied that non-MediaWiki-based solutions are likely to be considered where applicable. I imagine many people will complain out of change resistance impulse in the same way they have for Discussions (although development should have been a lot faster and constructive earlier on there).

If I could guess, something like the user namespace may be targeted in a way that does shift closer towards a social network design, citing the problem of user pages being edited without permission, for example. Another one is when vandals edit user pages who don’t actually belong to any user, making it confusing to observers.

Eventually message walls will be retired in favour of a non-MediaWiki profile feed; similar, but probably designed more to be more like a logbook than an office birthday card. Can’t say if it’ll be extremely similar to Discussions but I personally hope not. We need to have a way to locate stuff by date easily unlike currently.

MediaWiki architecture works and was designed for wikis, not for social networks. Like Discussions, the social areas of wikis will probably be slated for eventual redesigns. It might end up being a complete separation, such that a ‘Discussions’ network becomes the social arm that operates to accompany the actual encyclopaedia arm that forms the wiki as a whole.