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

Best,
Lodewijk

On Thu, Jun 16, 2022 at 3:06 PM MZMcBride <z@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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