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I wrote about this in my little article a few days ago. Wikipedia needs to raise money for the next 20 years, not for one year at a time. And then amaze their v

• neilk 15y ago
  Hi, I work at the WMF. I'll address your points here. > Why can’t we have Stypi recording all changes made to Wikipedia articles? Because Stypi didn't exist until a few months ago? Ok, more seriously: I and my colleagues have talked to everybody else that ever did collaborative editing tools. We know the Wave guys, the Etherpad guys, and others, over the past year. I myself did a little analysis of Stypi a little while ago to try to learn some things from them. We are working on this problem. I think you will be pleasantly surprised with the results shortly. The new editing "surface" is making progress by leaps and bounds lately. See http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Future and others. There are reasons why we can't just grab anything off the shelf like Etherpad, Wave, Etherpad-lite, or Stypi. MediaWiki already has a huge infrastructure of tools behind it and the entire community model is organized around chronologically ordered single-user discrete taggable edits of a very specialized format. Wikipedia wouldn't work well without all the bots and scripts that our community has written, and then we'd have to rewrite all of them too. Etherpad has plain text with bold and italic. Stypi has even less, as far as I know. It is possible to use these editors to create a collaborative way to edit wikitext (I did an experiment this summer to do just that). But that doesn't get us any closer to a GUI editor, which most people think is a sine qua non. Given the resources we have devoted to this -- basically some of the time of four or five engineers since March or so -- progress has actually been pretty good. Anyway, that's a slice of life at the WMF. Just so you know, in my corner of the world at least, we really are trying to make things awesome and it isn't costing the world a whole lot. > Why can’t we create more engaging Wikipedia articles using > something like Popcorn.js for videos? Again it comes down to the wikitext format. We do not have the liberty of banging out a new JS library and content model and then slowly adding features. Because the Foundation is adamant about never deploying any technology that's not 100% open source, we missed the whole wave of Flash-based video. Only in the past few years has it become possible to seriously do open source video in the browser. Michael Dale from Kaltura has written some great HTML5 video libraries for MediaWiki; watch for them on Wikipedia in the near future. In the meantime we're also upgrading our APIs and storage infrastructure to support uploading longer format videos and so on. This brings us into parity with maybe Youtube circa 2007 or so, with some more advanced editing and annotating tools due to the wiki-nature of everything we do. But better late than never.