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Comment by thesimon | Hacker News Reader

Don't they have more than enough money already?

They surely would if they weren’t needlessly adding terrible UX “features”

Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF. Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).

As a casual Wikipedia editor, I enjoy using the visual editor :(

I'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language. For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.

Interested. What UX "features" are you referring to?

VisualEditor is not worth it. It's being touted as a massive improvement, but which editors is it really catering too? Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway! The money could have been spent on an interactive markup tutorial instead. That would be way cheaper, because it has a linear flow. It would also have been easier because it isn't as performance critical, as it doesn't need to load millions of time per day, only as part of the onboarding process.

If you compare Wikimedias spending 5 years ago to what it is now, it has ballooned in such an excessive way if you put it in context. Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.

> VisualEditor is not worth it.

Surely it's "worth it" if you want the site to be usable by novice users. This is about optimizing for reach and intellectual diversity, not just "people who are currently adding value".

> Wikipedia isn't providing double the value of what it was 5 years ago.

Wikimedia supports other projects besides Wikipedia itself, and the value it provides has not just doubled but plausibly grown by an order of magnitude compared to its early days. Wikimedia Commons and Wikidata are hugely beneficial to the Internet community, and Wikivoyage is not far behind.

> Most valuable content in Wikipedia is written by a minority! By spending too much money on VisualEditor, you're optimizing for people who are barely adding value anyway!

Maybe this wouldn't be the case if pages were less complicated to edit?

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