User blog comment:Sannse/Your First Look at the New Wikia/@comment-473563-20100822012607

Improve users vs User-proof
I read in staff blogs that considerable engineering and marketing talent is being invested in the redesign of the Wikia skin with the goal to improving the user experience and to reach out to a wider audience ... among other things.

I wonder if just 20% of that talent was invested in educational tools (help pages, tutorials, examples, boiler-plates, etc.) then maybe the perceived need to idiot-proof the Wikia interface/experience might evaporate and, just maybe, the learning curve for new users coming to use Wikia can be improved.

The main thing is to keep the "main thing" the main thing
I may offend some readers when I write that I think of twitter-style comments as being a lazy-man's way of communicating. My 18-year-old does the same in my home - leaves his sentences incomplete hoping that someone else will complete the thought for him or telepathically pickup on his intended meaning. So maybe this particular style of communication is just another piece of generation-gap evidence - I am not sure. (Now I think of it, if an ex-president of the US can talk that way and rise to such a post then I suppose it's not really a generation-specific trait is it! mmmMMM)

Either way as the adage goes - "make new friends but keep the old ... one is silver but the other's gold" - please heed that advice and undertake to continue to cater to that vein of gold user-base that is responsible for populating Wikia with the sticky content that has attracted new users over the years to date.

By all means offer an alternative interface for new-comers but don't terminate the original basic wiki service you offered in the name of it simply being "time to upgrade". Both styles serve a purpose - I've no doubt about that. What I do doubt is the wisdom of force fitting one style to all purposes.

A publishing company will stock various paper types to print various types of book. Those might range from dictionaries or encyclopedias at one extreme of the non-fiction genre to picture books or story books at one end of the entertainment/fiction extreme and then address books, diaries and family trees at another end of the utility/hobby spectrum.

About the only thing those various book-types have in common is that they have Those are very basic elements and no reasonable person would imagine that there is one universally-applicable style for these three elements that will suit all styles of book that one might want to publish.
 * pages
 * a spine where those pages get bound together
 * a cover (some might have a dust-jacket in addition)

So why not
 * keep the plain old out-of the box MediaWiki and it's Monobook skin,
 * keep the slightly evolved Monaco/NewMonaco skin,
 * and add this newest skin to your arsenal

... while respecting the fact that different Wikia communities will choose different skins based on the needs/desires/goals of each community?

Extensions not Skins
If 50% of the engineering and marketing talent mentioned above was to be invested in upgrading/updating various extensions that are requested from time to time then Wikia communities would be empowered to create very innovative features at their wikis.

I'd have thought that these "behind the scenes" building blocks are considerably more valuable to the uptake of a wider market than the mere skin wrapper.

Just one opinion - maybe I'm misguided!