Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-31293812-20180528030935/@comment-24155515-20180821131750

To restate the reason for switching off Monobook: It had to do with not wanting to run compliant systems in parallel.

To get a little angry about the shortcomings of Wikia and later-version Mediawiki features it doesn't support that could be useful:

Far as I can tell, Wikia is trying to design itself for readers and beginner Mediawiki editors.

But the wikis that get the most success are those which are well-designed and written (and active), which is more likely to happen when the editors are more familiar with the software.

Why design a platform to cater to readers when you're not going to make it easy for Mediawiki vets to write things? I think engagement of Mediawiki beginners is a noble cause (I'm all for new user engagement!), but I'm not sure how well it's actually doing it or how much it's throwing features that would be useful to experienced users by the wayside.

For one example of what seems like failed beginner engagement: It seems most people using what I'd call "beginner features" on some of the wikis I use are doing it to badge collect (when the achievements extension is enabled)--in the case of the wiki I admin, they have learned to do this just borderline enough (i.e. not trash edits but not substantive ones either) that I can't usually warn them for our no-editing-just-to-badge-collect rule. They're engaged right now, but I fear they won't garner enough experience to feel like sticking around after they run out of badges to get. If this is usual, then Wikia would look at the traffic and go "hey, users!" but maybe not care who those users are or how well they're editing.

For an example of what feels like failed experienced user retention: Features that are more commonly used by higher-level users are often not visible in any default, usual part of the site interface. For instance, I use Special:Upload almost exclusively (because the more beginner-level uploaders are either clunky or outright bad (which, to go back to the previous paragraph for a moment, is not good for learning to properly upload a photo and thus become a better editor)) and as far as I can tell, it only shows up if you add it to your lower toolbar yourself. If the feature isn't not-visible then it might be outright disabled, like Monobook--many Monobook users cited having links like those easily accessible and in the open by default as one reason for using the skin.

...So if a wiki keeps cycling through new users just looking to collect badges and fails at retaining more experienced ones to make edits and help those new users to further engage in the wiki, then who's writing the content?

TL;DR: What's the point of catering to readers of a wiki if you're failing to keep people around who would write/design enough of it well enough to attract readers in the first place?