> Have you ever looked at the Mediawiki code base? Last time I skimmed a bit, a few years ago, it was an utterly horrible mess of spaghetti PHP. Just finding developers capable of doing this would be a big challenge. The Wikimedia Foundation has a lot less resources than you might imagine, considering the reach of its projects, and there are an awful lot of other funding priorities (not to mention other code priorities). They’re doing the best they can, but making sweeping changes to the code base is a lot harder than it looks.
If they lack the resources to do it, they could easily raise the money via a targeted donation drive or a kickstarter project. Telling the web: "Hey, here's what we want to do to make Wikipedia editing better, but we need $X to do it" would probably raise the target many times over. If they can't find good programmers right now, offer triple the salary or whatever. Incentives work.
> It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
How do you know whether I'm an insider or outsider?
I've contributed thousands of edits and was very active on Wikipedia maybe 6-7 years ago, but mostly stopped because of all the internal politics. Now I just fix typos or formatting errors when I notice them.
The fact is, if creating an easier way for newbies to contribute was a priority for the organization, I'm pretty sure they could have done it over the past many years. In that time whole companies were created from scratch. I can't believe that an organization as powerful (with such support and mindshare worldwide) as Wikipedia couldn't created a GUI editor. I could be wrong, but it just doesn't feel like they want it that much to happen, and the challenges in their way are used as excuses for not going full steam ahead...
If they lack the resources to do it, they could easily raise the money via a targeted donation drive or a kickstarter project. Telling the web: "Hey, here's what we want to do to make Wikipedia editing better, but we need $X to do it" would probably raise the target many times over. If they can't find good programmers right now, offer triple the salary or whatever. Incentives work.
> It’s easy to hate on anything, as a disinterested outsider, without making any real attempt to understand the internal processes involved, but organizing millions of people is a highly non-trivial job, and I think the Wikimedia community has done pretty admirably, all things considered.
How do you know whether I'm an insider or outsider?
I've contributed thousands of edits and was very active on Wikipedia maybe 6-7 years ago, but mostly stopped because of all the internal politics. Now I just fix typos or formatting errors when I notice them.
The fact is, if creating an easier way for newbies to contribute was a priority for the organization, I'm pretty sure they could have done it over the past many years. In that time whole companies were created from scratch. I can't believe that an organization as powerful (with such support and mindshare worldwide) as Wikipedia couldn't created a GUI editor. I could be wrong, but it just doesn't feel like they want it that much to happen, and the challenges in their way are used as excuses for not going full steam ahead...