Board Thread:New Features/@comment-26522807-20160208225359/@comment-11733175-20160224220905

Wikia considers themselves to be a separate platform to MediaWiki due to all the alterations over the years, and thus don't have any real interest in upgrading for the foreseeable future. It's more work than they'd like to invest for gains they don't perceive to be significant (it's another matter if they're significant for a subset of users).

The only reason Wikia will ever upgrade is if a feature becomes available in MediaWiki that they really, really want. ResourceLoader is the main reason we're on 1.19, if it weren't for that it's likely we'd be on 1.16 still.

It's disappointing, but given how badly and time consuming the last upgrade went, it's not entirely unsurprising.