User blog comment:Ducksoup/The Future of Infoboxes on Wikia/@comment-24001421-20150820005647/@comment-2240397-20150824212534

Hey, It's actually a very good questions. We wanted to replace infoboxes with the standardized markup in order to unlock few opportunities:
 * first, already visible one, was new visual treatment on mobile
 * to build GUI on top of the markup (the wikitext solution was too free form to allow building GUI for it).
 * to be able, if necesary, update the infobox markup together with changing web standards
 * separate data from view and be able to control both and thanks to it be able to add new easy styles to infoboxes (to come) and use the data separately to give power users some data fueled power tools.
 * and many more.

I other words this is not only about Mobile, it's about making Wikia experience better also on desktop and ant other platform. I know it doesn't look like that now, but it's just a first step on a very long road :)