User blog comment:MisterWoodhouse/Fandom is upgrading to a modern version of MediaWiki/@comment-3020860-20190629182845

I'm excited to hear this. One of the things Wikia is missing out on is cross-pollination of knowledge from the millions of experienced MediaWiki editors out there. Whether it's with the Wikimedia properties or other MediaWiki-based sites, many of us have a great depth of familiarity with and understanding of the platform, and the more of that knowledge we can apply to Wikia sites, the better.

My most recent request was for Special:ExpandTemplates, and the response was a polite but firm "no". (I get it. For MediaWiki 1.19 it was an extension, and by now a very out-of-date one. But it'll come for free with the upgrade, since it's now a built-in feature, so problem solved!)

Just... please don't come up with some crazy reason to disable it. I can't imagine why you would, but my imagination is limited. It's hard to see a down side to editors being able to perform out-of-band tests, instead of having to edit live content and cross their fingers that it works the way they thought. And for edit-protected pages, it provides a means to compose edit requests with confidence.

If the sandbox features (including the TemplateSandbox extension) are to be enabled in the upgraded system, that's also a huge help to non-admin editors, and makes ExpandTemplates less critical. But sandbox is complex, and may be overkill for Wikia sites.