Re:Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
by blululu on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @01:18PM
(#23479591)
Not to justify wasting money, but the questionable UX features are a relatively small part of the massive cash fire that is the WMF.
Also, while there have been some large and costly failures (Visual Editor), UX features are one of the few areas where I think that the WMF could realistically advance their purpose: increasing engagement with the encyclopedia. Features like Page Previews can be very helpful. There are a number of possible UX tweaks to improve reading and editing the encyclopedia, and these could all be helpful to the long term health of the encyclopedia (assuming they don't cut into the budget for servers).
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Re:Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
by saagarjha on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @02:18PM
(#23480316)
As a casual Wikipedia editor, I enjoy using the visual editor :(
Re:Wikipedia Lost 3B Organic Search Visits to Google in 2019
by blululu on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @04:27PM
(#23481676)
I'm honestly glad to hear that. The main point of the Visual Editor was to make editing Wikipedia easier and more inclusive. The research suggests that it did not really succeed in achieving these goals. This result is a little surprising to me, but there are probably bigger barriers to editing wikipedia than a markup language.
For some people the visual editor is great, and I think that as a long term investment it was a good idea (the benefit could have been large) even though it did not pan out. The problem is that the cost and time spent creating it was very high, and the WMF foundation has a lousy track record executing these projects effectively.