I'm with you all the way on that one. But as you know, MediaWiki's brand of wikitext is famously impossible to work with. So, while it may not seem that way,

I'm with you all the way on that one. But as you know, MediaWiki's brand of wikitext is famously impossible to work with. So, while it may not seem that way, really, the most important thing we're doing is redoing the parser and all the parsing infrastructure so it can export in forms that people can actually do something with. So if someone else wants to make the ultimate Wikipedia mobile app we won't have to be involved. Our official reason for redoing the parser is to make the GUI editor more possible, but IMO exporting is going to be the bigger application. In the meantime though, I still think the WMF has a role to play, particularly in making content available on mobile. Only this year, they finally got some of that straightened out (previously there was an inadequate Ruby on Rails proxy that was serving m.wikipedia.org). As a technologist, it's easy for me to point fingers, and say that some of the more ambitious stuff isn't warranted, or is too "soft", and we should focus on other stuff. But I have to say, my mind was completely changed by seeing how the academic outreach program worked out brilliantly. It will one day seem weird to have done a research paper that was reviewed and read by only one person. (Similarly, the people who work on that stuff have no idea what the "tech side" of the foundation are doing, in detail. Like if they ask when are they going to be able to upload more than 100MB long videos, it's hard to explain to them that we're undergoing a painful transition from NFS file storage to a media abstraction layer with a Python-powered distributed-hash-table + object storage server, and we're also making sure our new chunked uploading protocol works.) Anyway, it's a non-profit. These institutions are far from ideal and sometimes end up doing strange things for reasons which don't make sense outside the institutional context. The same things happen all the time at for-profits, but you don't get to debate it as much. :)