Well, none of them are to my taste aesthetically, either. One of the best looking MediaWiki installs that I’ve seen is WordPress’s version (http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page), simply because its design is so well integrated with the rest of the site (click through a few of their tabs to see the consistency of the theme). In the end, I think we’d be well advised to follow that example and to make our MediaWiki styling match the styling of our main blog. We’re actually not that far off right now.
Design by committee is almost always a dubious proposition, anyway. What I think a group like this could be much better suited to doing is thinking through the ways in which we might make the wiki a more robust area of the site. Here are a few questions we might consider, at least at the beginning:
1. How can we better organize and restructure the wiki so that information on it is more visible and more useful? In what ways can we improve its semantic functionality?
2. What can we do to better encourage members of the site to make use of the considerable number of collaborative options that a wiki affords?
To help us answer those questions, I’d like to ask members of this group to consider our current usage of the wiki and to brainstorm ways in which individuals and groups on the Commons might use it productively in the future. I’d also like to ask this group to think about MediaWiki extensions that we might add that would extend the functionality of our wiki (see the full list here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Extensions). The Dev team will have to vet the code of any extensions we decide on, but we should take advantage of the fact that we’re using an open-source tool and extend it to meet our needs.
I think that the wiki could potentially be one of the most vibrant areas of our site; thanks to all of you in advance for contributing to this effort to improve it.
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