On Thu, Sep 2, 2010 at 2:48 PM, Marcus Buck <wiki(a)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.