There are many reasons to skin your MediaWiki wiki. Some of them are as follows:
Distinguishing your wiki's look and feel through your own choice of colors, images, and fonts.
Integrating the wiki with the rest of your website. This can include adding navigation to other areas of your website, or simply copying the design of your main website.
Usability means if your wiki exists for a particular purpose, a custom skin can emphasize the features that are important for the users.
Adding widgets such as advertisements, social media buttons, and other external content, and removing some features of MediaWiki.
We will take a closer look at each of these before moving on to look at our case study.
Skinning your wiki allows you to distinguish your website from the other websites by using one of the skins supplied with the installation. If your wiki is aimed at a niche usergroup, skinning your wiki can indicate the information in your wiki to the visitors. For example, if your wiki is about tea bags of the nineteenth century, a design that subtly suggests the visitors that the website is about tea bags of the 1800s would prove to be a good idea. In contrast, if you are aiming to create the next Wikipedia, using a skin that features scenes of the French Revolution may not be such a great idea.
The skinning of AboutUs does exactly that. It differentiates the wiki from the MonoBook clones that populate the Internet so densely.
You can skin your wiki so that it matches the rest of your website. This would prove to be important in business websites that utilize wikis. The reason for this is that reinforcing your brand, including your company logo, name, and color scheme can help the customers in remembering your company. This can aid in providing a smooth transition from where a visitor starts viewing your website to where they obtain the information that they were looking for in your website.
The WordPress Codex is a good example of integrating a wiki into an existing website design.
A redesigned wiki can place relevant elements in better positions. When you want to encourage a lot of people to edit your wiki, making the edit link the focus of the page will be helpful. When you want to encourage people to discuss articles on your wiki, a more prominent discussion link will be helpful. If your wiki articles are short, you will need to add more content in order to make it more readable for the visitors.
Altering your wiki's design is a good idea if you want to incorporate more features such as social-bookmarking links so that the visitors can add pages to Digg, Facebook, and Technorati. Skinning MediaWiki will also allow you to remove features such as the discussion page on "AboutUs". Advertising is another feature of 'AboutUs'. It can be added to your wiki so as to help you generate revenue to pay for hosting your wiki.