Board Thread:New Features/@comment-24739709-20150518230347/@comment-24473195-20150820234333

EternalLocket wrote: @Dessamator the only thing that would win me over is if styling is within the template. The templates seem, based off just one I looked at, simple enough to pick up. But moving the styling outside of the template "just because" is a no-go for me. I'd rather not alienate people from making a new template, I'd also rather not have to wait or purge the page just to see changes I may want to make. And considering they just recently had the CSS page temporarily locked, I would think that would be even more reason not to put part of such a prominent tool on wiki behind something wikia could/will lock in case of emergencies. Hmm, it is not really a problem. If you read through this thread, you'll find that you can easily define an import in your common.css or wikia.css, that will get the styles from a particular page ( see).

When someone can mess around with the code directly, it automatically restricts the developers. Wikitext is a flawed markup. It has been held together by glue and tape, and it has devolved through feature creep into something that even its creators don't truly entirely understand. If the developers want to improve or change old functionality, they will risk breaking a million pages and the ire of editors because there isn't enough separation between the front-end and the back end. So in the year 2015 mediawiki likely works like software did in 2005.

Its interesting that you believe using some markup/css will alienate people, wikipedia has been losing editors for years because they were obsessed with wikitext [1]. No matter how popular wikia is today, the same will happen to it if it doesn't improve its tools.