[Foundation-l] Why is the software out of reach of the community?

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2009 at 5:33 PM, Brian <Brian.Mingus at colorado.edu> wrote:
> In order to solicit community feedback on this very important issue, I
> suggest the Foundation put up a multi-language banner on all Wikipedia's
> soliciting input via a survey.

Are you willing to make the translations and the banner? Are you
willing to make the survey, administer it, and interpret results? Most
of the "Foundation" are volunteers who can't put multilingual banners
all over the place every time somebody would like to know some vague
something about the software.

> *How can Wikipedia be more usable?*
>
> I also suggest the Foundation put up a We're Hiring banner. In tough global
> economic conditions, and for the amount of money the Foundation has been
> given, they could afford to hire 20 best in class developers who are
> otherwise out of work.
>
> 800,000 / 30,000 = 26. Is that not a fair wage? If the Foundation only plans
> to hire three developers to work on this project then it must be spending
> the money on something else entirely.

First off, I'm a professional software developer and I would not work
for $30K. For 800K/year, you're looking at more like 10-15 developers
at the most, and that's under the assumption that you're only hiring
them for a single year. You're going to spend a lot of up-front time
training them, so the better investment by far is 3-5 developers for
several years. This is not to mention cost increases for hardware and
hosting that will come from adding more software to the backend and a
"prettier" frontend.

> The community also deserves a usability lab, and a full assessment of how
> Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Forms, and Project Halo could contribute to
> usability. I predict they will find that, while they do not cover every
> problem, the main issue that needs to be worked on is scaling them. This is
> something that the core developers are experts at. They are not experts on
> usability.

If our core developers are not experts in usability (and I wouldn't
necessarily agree with that point anyway), then it makes sense to hire
people who are good with usability. If you look at the job postings,
you'll see that it's exactly what is intended. Setting up some kind of
"usability lab" has already been done, see
https://en.labs.wikimedia.org. This is the exact clearinghouse where
the Collections extension and FlaggedRevs extension were tested.

> I would like to make clear that I believe the usability issue has largely
> been solved, and the community is just waiting for the core developers, who
> have kept a tight lock and key on the source code, to recognize that.

The issue most certainly hasn't been solved. It's not just about
finding pretty tools, but about scaling them to fit Wikipedia (which
is no trivial task), and ensuring that they meet the needs of our
users. These things don't happen by insulting our developers or making
demands on a mailing list alone.

--Andrew Whitworth