On Thu, Sep 24, 2009 at 4:28 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus(a)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.