3 ms·
> It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development si
by JeanFred 6y ago
> It was already a top visited site when its development team consisted of a single person, Brion Vibber. There have been very little significant development since then […].
The second member of the development team was hired in 2006 [0].
In these ~14 years, quite a few things happened.
Three projects joined the Wikimedia galaxy: Wikiversity in 2006, Wikivoyage adopted in 2012, and frickin’ Wikidata [1] in 2012 − which has deeply reshaped many aspects of the other projects, particularly Wikipedias and Commons.
On the multimedia side of things, we got InstantCommons in 2008 [3], thumbnailing infrastructure changes in 2013, various file format support (TIFF in 2010, FLAC and WAV in 2013, WebM, 3D formats in 2018 [4]) new upload wizard in 2011 [5]. The Graph extension [6] and Wikimedia Maps [7] in 2015. Structured Data on Commons in 2019 [8]. New default skin (Vector) in 2010 [9]. Unified login in 2008 [10]. 2013 brought OAuth [11], Echo notifications [12], Lua scripting [13], VisualEditor [14]. iOS and Android apps [15]. The Wikimedia Cloud Services starting 2012 [2].
(And in terms of size: article count went from ~5M to ~50M [16] ; Commons went from 1M files to 50M files [17])
And that’s just what I’m putting together in a few minutes (Besides my own memory, I’m indebted to [18], a curated timeline up until 2013).
Of course, these may or may not justify the staff size in your book ; but I’d say discounting all of that (and the rest) as “very little significant development” is a bit pushing it. :-)
(And fairly sure that “you’d probably notice” if Wikipedia was still using good’old Monobook skin ;-þ).
[0] https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Additional_developer https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Resolution:Additional_...
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/ https://www.wikidata.org/
[2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/ https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/
[3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/InstantCommons
[4] https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/02/20/three-dimensional-models/ https://wikimediafoundation.org/news/2018/02/20/three-dimens...
[5] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload_Wizard https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Upload_Wizard
[6] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph
[7] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps
[8] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Structured_data
[9] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vector https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Vector
[10] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
[11] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:OAuth https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:OAuth
[12] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications) https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)
[13] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lua https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lua
[14] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor
[15] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Apps
[16] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias/Table
[17] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Milestones https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Milestones
[18] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gpaumier/wikipedia-infographic/master/preview.png https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gpaumier/wikipedia-infogra...