User blog comment:Dammej/A glimpse of the future (of the wiki)/@comment-1891865-20100924063951/@comment-2088100-20100924212641

You sure about that silverstrike? Their FAQ seems pretty clear: "The main reason for requiring everyone to move to the new look is that it’s simply not practical or economical for us to maintain and develop features for multiple skins. As we create new features, or update existing ones, we will only be doing so for the new look and Monaco will be left behind. This will especially be an issue when we upgrade to Mediawiki 1.16. This upgrade will involve checking each feature against the new code, and we don’t have the capacity to do that twice!

We recognize that some people would rather use the unsupported version of Monaco, but one of our biggest goals is to provide a consistent, high quality experience for all users, and we believe having everyone on the new look is the right way to do this."

So, Monaco might stay around, but it's going to stagnate, and they won't be supporting it.