How would you propose to measure 'output' in a somewhat objective way? It
is of course easy to identify that our own pet projects don't get the
attention we feel they deserve, but given that the priorities of the WMF
are so much broader than those of you and me personally, that may not be
entirely fair. Especially if you consider that the changes that the WMF
comes up with often meet a lot of pushback from the community. It might be
nice though to make a little more explicit someplace how our environment is
changing over time, because I am sure that there's a lot of things that we
almost don't notice, but make life better, or forget quickly because it's
such a logical improvement. Not so much from accountability perspective,
but more from a historical lens.
(as a sidenote: it turns out that the team has been roughly this big for a
while now)
If your question is asking about 'what are you working on' (which is
related to but different from 'what have you seen as output'), you could
take a peek at their phabricator board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/design/>.
Best,
Lodewijk
On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 3:06 PM MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
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
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