On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Marcus Buck wiki@marcusbuck.org wrote:
The Foundation has a budget of 20 million $ this financial year. It plans to spend 8.972 million $ on 91 staff members. That's 98,593.41$ per person. So there are resources. They are just planned to be spend for other things.
With that background I do not like the "yeah, nice idea, do it yourself" approach whenever somebody proposes good ideas.
What's the alternative? There are *always* going to be many more ideas than implementers. Ideas are cheap. Wikimedia has to decide which features are the most critical to invest developer time in. Their decision is not going to make everyone happy. The only guarantee you can ever have is if you do it yourself. Happily, MediaWiki is open-source, so you *do* have that option! On practically any other major website, you couldn't add a feature no matter how much you wanted to.
In my opinion the Foundation should employ several developers who don't have any other task than improving Wikimedia. There should be a pool of improvement ideas that can be rated by importance by the Wikimedia users. The paid developers should then be able to pick improvement ideas and implement them preferring projects that are rated important. That way we can ensure a constant flow of innovation for Wikimedia.
We already have that to a decent extent. Bugzilla votes do count for something. That's undoubtedly part of why I was asked to work on bug 164 -- it's had the most votes of any Bugzilla bug for years. But popularity is only a small part of the story. What you have to ask is not what features would you like to see most, but what features are most *cost-effective*. Users can easily say how much they'd like feature X, but they're in no position to gauge how many other features would have to be cut to account for it. A very popular bug that would require a couple of developers working full-time for months to fix properly might just not be worth it, if the same development effort could fix a large number of less-popular bugs. Users are just not in a position to judge this, so while popularity is a factor, it can't be the deciding one.