On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Brian Brian.Mingus@colorado.edu wrote:
I definitely think it's a good idea to go after the low hanging fruit first, which it sounds like is what they are doing with this 800k. Fixing the core of the problem is definitely not low hanging fruit - it's hard work. On the other hand, the foundation just got a couple million in unrestricted funds, and when I say that they can start fixing the problem at any time, I mean they can seek out an additional grant if necessary for this specific issue. Basically what I am saying is that I don't jive with the perspective that we should accept wikitext as it is and hack in new "fixes" on top of it. I would like to see the foundation go out and try to fix this problem the correct way, starting nowish.
They could do that. I wouldn't be surprised if they start serious WYSIWYG work in a year or two. But there are a *lot* of things on Wikipedia that could be improved. Even with the big grants Wikimedia's now getting, it operates on a budget less than 0.1% that of some comparably large websites (like Google).
Right now I hope we're going to focus on getting more full-time experienced programmers, like hiring a CTO and letting Brion become only senior software architect. We have lots of junior people doing work, but code review is still a huge bottleneck AFAICT. Just look at the current discussion on JS2, for instance, or the outages caused by performance problems that weren't caught before deployment.