- I don't have anything pticly interesting to add to the main thrust of this op-ed apart from it seeming like a reasonable suggestion. One thing I would suggest, though, is that I don't believe the community wishlist should be the only criterion for feature prioritisation. While the existing editor community is important, we are not the primary stakeholders in Wikipedia — the readers are. And we have other issues to deal with (systemic bias and the loss of readership to Google's Knowledge Graph search sidebar, to name only 2), which need addressing yet are less likely to seem important to the existing editor community (by definition, in the case of the former). One of the purposes of the WMF Board — or some part of the proposed Wikimedia Technology Foundation, rather — should be to determine which external tasks need prioritising over which community-defined tasks. That said, this is definitely a great starting point for discussion; let's hope a fruitful conversation starts from here... — OwenBlacker (Talk) 21:05, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- The overriding question is who gets to speak for "the readers"? They are hopefully the reason why we are all here and I spend much of my time thinking about this question. The WMF definitely does not get a monopoly when it comes to doing so. IMO these decisions need to be made jointly by the movement as a whole and hopefully based as much as possible on evidence.
- With respect to "losing readers" our pageviews per the most recent data from Feb 2016 has been flat or with a slight decrease. While we would all like to see it growing we are not becoming insignificant. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:34, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
She's an Aquarius ten years older than me! Wikipedia is young! --violetnese 23:08, 13 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
- Speaking of whether the community-defined tasks should be unequivocally prioritised... “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses,” as Henry Ford famously said. Some of the best things were invented or created by doing something that hadn't made sense to anyone at the time. Like Wikipedia. Instead of asking people, would they like an online encyclopaedia that any person on the internet can edit anonymously, you-know-who just launched one. And it worked, phenomenally. Google is everything it is now because it keeps investing into things that don't make sense at the time of investment. Some of them work (like YouTube), some don't (like Wave). If we want Wikimedia Foundation to innovate and come up with great stuff, we should give it a mandate to try stuff and fail at it, too. If we ask the community that formed, culturally, in early 2000s, how can a website, which was designed in early 2000s, be improved, we will never get a website that can work in 2020s. And more importantly, we won't attract people who would have been able to build such a website. I think that a significant portion of that huge budget should go towards fostering startup and innovation culture, globally, to support people who want to build "a better Wikipedia", or "a different Wikipedia", or "not at all a Wikipedia", to finally figure out, as a movement, what Wikipedia should be in the next 15 years. --SSneg (talk) 01:12, 15 March 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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