[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly

[Tom Morris]

On Monday, 16 July 2012 at 19:46, Andreas Kolbe wrote:
> I honestly don't understand why it is taking so many years to develop a
> WYSIWYG editor, for example, or a new Commons search function. Honestly,
> people, if you want to create paid jobs, don't inflate the chapter
> structure, but employ and pay a few programmers and designers.


I'm no great shakes as a programmer (in fact, I'm an exceptionally lazy programmer), but I know why it takes so long to develop a WYSIWYG editor: because doing it properly is actually kind of a hard problem. And as the Mythical Man Month points out, you can't just keep on adding programmers if you want it done faster. Software development teams don't actually scale that well. 

-- 
Tom Morris
<http://tommorris.org/>