Hello.
I happened to look at <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Design> earlier today and I
noticed that the Wikimedia Foundation Inc. design team is about 24 people these days. I
found this very surprising, as that's quite a few people. And it's even more
perplexing if you have visited Wikimedia wikis previously, as they're somewhat
infamously not known for cutting-edge design. The vast majority of the content is very
simple headings, body text, and sometimes thumbnails, all wrapped within a site skin that
very infrequently changes.
If we assume that each design person's salary is $70,000/year USD, which I think is a
very conservative estimate, that's about $1,680,000 of donor money spent per year on
just design team salaries. Again, the actual figure is probably much higher.
When $1.68M of donor money is spent each year, what are we getting in return? Concretely
and specifically, what is the return on this very large amount of money being spent every
year? I see the various titles listed such as design researcher and user experience
designer, but I can't wrap my head around what all of this money is being spent on,
having personally used Wikimedia sites and services for more than 15 years.
MZMcBride