[Wikimedia-l] Apparently, Wikipedia is ugly

[Andreas Kolbe]

On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 4:45 PM, Deryck Chan <deryckchan at wikimedia.hk>wrote:

> On 17 July 2012 00:46, Andreas Kolbe <jayen466 at gmail.com> 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.
> >
> > On 25 July 2012 16:41, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > "I don't understand it, so it must be simple." This often turns out
> > not to be the case.
>



In the case of the sensible Commons search function Niabot proposed, the
problem did sound rather easy to solve.

>From memory, the answer was: "Everybody is busy with other stuff. Nobody
has time to look into this. We've got so much to do ..."




> > I realised both that it was an incredibly difficult problem, and that WMF
> is really serious about getting on with it, when they decided to hire James
> F. to take charge of the project.
>



So there were how many years of faffing about before they hired *one guy*
for this project? This is an organisation with a $20m annual budget, now
acquiring umpteen paid chapter officials.

Wikipedia is about as user-friendly as Wordstar was in 1985.