The goal of Wikipedia is for every "person on the planet [to be] given free access to the sum of all human knowledge".

The community is a means to that end, not the end.

> Yet another Wikimedia project with way too lofty ambitions...

Perhaps, but so what. Wikidata was "a project with way too lofty ambitions" back when it started (a.k.a. make the Semantic Web something that actually works in a useful way) and it's been wildly successful. It now gets more edits per minute than the most popular Wikipedia and gets used all over the place by Big Tech firms.

What are some of those greater needs that are not being met?

It's been a hot minute since I last looked at the most recent list, but the short of it is that the WMF likes to release extensions onto Wikipedias that ship with a ton of technical bugs, aren't tested beforehand by the Wikipedia community for usability (which is ironic given the WMFs obsession with making tools as accessible as possible) and when the complaints get leveled, the response from the WMF basically ends up being "yeah so there's no budget for that". Rinse and repeat for a ton of tiny technical issues that affect all their extensions on the regular. It's a bit odd to be putting so many engineers and money onto lofty projects when the maintenance of Wikimedia extensions is in such an extremely precarious state already.

The most evergreen example of this is and probably always will be the rollout of VisualEditor, their WYSIWG editor. It was completely unwanted, was proven to be not ready for general use (due to all the problems that plague "combining a WYSIWG editor with a code view"), yet forcibly deployed on all Wikipedia languages without much room for warning or feedback. After that, the WMF promised communities the option to opt-out if they didn't want it... before violating it on the German Wikipedia because they voted to not roll it out. To my knowledge, VisualEditor hasn't improved over the years (beyond "rewrite Parsoid into PHP"), but editors have just gritted their teeth. That's the extreme example, but the WMFs relationship with building features for Wikipedia is... pretty much in a vacuum from what users want. A lot of their projects seem to be conceived by WMF managers first, without consultation to their existing community of volunteers.

Which is I guess fine for moonshot projects like Wikifunctions (since they don't involve the volunteers before release) but results in a lot of friction when a managers pet project is forcibly rolled out on all language Wikipedias. Very few of their big extension deployments have gone smoothly with the community. I distinctly remember the Minerva skin (mobile Wikipedia) needing tons of changes and improvements before it was usable as well, after it was already rolled out and caused a ton of negative fedback.

VisualEditor has actually rolled out lots of features since it first came out, and more are in the pipeline that rely on the same infrastructure (particularly around helping novices find things they can help with). You don't have to use it if you don't like it, but it's been huge for helping less technical users become contributors.

Both can be, and are, true.

The Visual Editor works better now for its designed purpose than it did before, and rewriting Parsoid in PHP made it easier to deploy and maintain across projects (and in general Mediawiki). For editing text and non-templated content, which is the bulk of the work and the entry point for new contributors, it's matured into a useful tool.

The Visual Editor was also designed around English and European Wikipedia usage, and it still causes problems for other Wikipedia languages and for Wikimedia projects outside of Wikipedia. It has strong built-in opinions about the usage and design of skins and templates that other Wikimedia projects disagreed with.

And it's still frustrating as tech, both in bugs and by design, and especially when used in situations where wikitext editing is still common or required. It has caching and session bugs that either don't affect or aren't as destructive to other editing tools, or even pre-PHP Parsoid versions of VE. It still makes unnecessary wikitext changes — and arbitrary, if you weren't in the discussions where they were implemented or closed out as Won't Fix — to formatting and templates based on its own strong opinions. It breaks completely on interwiki redirects, a bigger problem for projects outside of Wikipedia than inside of it.

It's a useful, arguably invaluable, tool for new contributors that was badly designed at launch, has improved since, but is still fundamentally incompatible with many use cases into which it's been forced.

Thanks, that was really informative.

Not assaulting users with giant ad banners which contain deceitful language about the need for funding to trick people who are on average much worse off than employees of SF-headquartered Wikimedia.