Possible Useful Improvements to Wikimedia Software

[Randy from Boise]

At my friend Poetlister's suggestion in another thread, let me get the ball rolling.

Creating skins that change the appearance of the underlying software on-screen is no doubt regarded as boring monkeywork by software engineers, but it is the single easiest and best thing that can be done with little cost or controversy by WMF engineering to improve the Wikipedia using experience of millions of people.

I use the Cologne Blue skin. It's almost unimaginable going back to the Craigslist-flavored original recipe visuals at this point.

So: develop 10 new skins and publicize how to set them. If one becomes a rave favorite, take it to the communities to change the default view.

RfB

[Vigilant]

At my friend Poetlister's suggestion in another thread, let me get the ball rolling.

Creating skins that change the appearance of the underlying software on-screen is no doubt regarded as boring monkeywork by software engineers, but it is the single easiest and best thing that can be done with little cost or controversy by WMF engineering to improve the Wikipedia using experience of millions of people.

I use the Cologne Blue skin. It's almost imaginable going back to the Craigslist-flavored original recipe visuals at this point.

So: develop 10 new skins and publicize how to set them. If one becomes a rave favorite, take it to the communities to change the default view.

RfB

User facing switches to be able to disable any and all wmf provided software.
These should persist between sessions.

Automatically tagging any edit by any WMF employee/contractor/staff/board member/grant committee/affillitations committee member using their 'personal account' as a WMF employee edit.
May that tag searchable over all wiki spaces.

[Kumioko]

- A better edit filter that didn't require every single transaction to go through it.
- Better report generation capability
- A public watchlist to go with the private one
- the ability to have multiple watchlists
- replacement of incompetent WMF staff members with people who were qualified

[Carcharoth]

A funny example of Wikimedia software (or bolt-ons?) that wasn't maintained and now is being argued over is here. Apparently the WMF get some of the money that PediaPress make by 'printing' and selling Wikipedia articles packaged as books. Who know? (the real eye-openers are the comments made by 'the maintainer of mediawiki2latex' [search for that to jump to it in the discussion]).

[Kumioko]

A funny example of Wikimedia software (or bolt-ons?) that wasn't maintained and now is being argued over is here. Apparently the WMF get some of the money that PediaPress make by 'printing' and selling Wikipedia articles packaged as books. Who know? (the real eye-openers are the comments made by 'the maintainer of mediawiki2latex' [search for that to jump to it in the discussion]).

That's rather surprising but it makes sense now why they haven't really gone after the pediapress folks for ripping off their content. as I have said before, the WMF is all about the money, so if someone's cutting them a piece of the action, they'll back off.

[Poetlister]

- A better edit filter that didn't require every single transaction to go through it.
- Better report generation capability
- A public watchlist to go with the private one
- the ability to have multiple watchlists
- replacement of incompetent WMF staff members with people who were qualified

These are all good ideas. The last one doesn't even require any developers. However, we'd have to start with getting a good ED, and then sorting out the HR department. It might thus be far more difficult than the other ideas.

[Bezdomni]

A funny example of Wikimedia software (or bolt-ons?) that wasn't maintained and now is being argued over is here. Apparently the WMF get some of the money that PediaPress make by 'printing' and selling Wikipedia articles packaged as books. Who know? (the real eye-openers are the comments made by 'the maintainer of mediawiki2latex' [search for that to jump to it in the discussion]).

[...] closing the book feature might cause pediapress to stop all business activities in this field, which causes me to have a monopoly, which is the greatest thing you can get in capitalism.