Wow. They've actually scored a good fraction of a million dollars to do a study to show that people are NOT being scared off by the fact that the site coddles vandals, insults experts, and is generally run by pricks.

This is just one reason why I'm pretty sure there is no god.

Nice swindle!

Stop, stop already with the same press release about this insanity. What newbies need is a box-link to WP:WIKISPEAK. Now, that would help.

This will be interesting. I think throwing a million dollars at making something more user friendly is unlikely to result in any improvements in that direction, other than in a few items already on the devs to do list. It will also cause tension between existing users, who have an investment in their current skillset, as limited as that might seem, and the devs tasked with the new job. Finally it will create a conflict between a funder's objectives, simplification, and more sophisticated concerns such as BLP reform, flagged revisions, COI identification etc, none of which makes using Wikipedia any "simpler."

Mod note: I've tried to rescue various comments from being buried in the swathe of posts

$900k for 3 developers might suggest that this is a 3 year project, or someone is skimming a lot from this for other projects.

PHP developers in this economy are worth about $45k a year, maybe $60k when you factor in Silly Valley cost-of-living (but there's really no reason to hire in Silly Valley). You can mail-order them from India for a whole hell of a lot less. Even with overhead, I would expect $900k should fund at least 100-150 man-months of development time, maybe as much as 200.

Reading again, it is for 3 developers, a UI designer and a project manager. It still doesn't seem much staff for the money, and suggests a slow delivery of results.

On these projects you don't want lots of fingers, but you do need high quality developers, someone will need to be pretty hot to be able to do a wysiwyg editor - I look at Google docs and see how few features they have with their man-power compared with the real deal. Essentially writing Word in Ajax is going to be tough.

It also is an indication that they've abandoned one element of the community model and Be Bold! - the theory was that anyone should feel that it was ok to hack around and someone would clean up after them. I think the USENET top-post attitude has leaked through enough that people have been intimidated.

Of course, to really fix the problem that Sue Garner has identified, she needs to fix the inverted snobbery against editors who actually know what they are talking about.

Since nearly 3 years have past, yet Wikipedia's not any easier to edit, the Stanton Foundation is going to puke up even more money all over Sue Gardner's boondoggle.

For fucks sake a WYSIWYG editor don't take a $million to create. There are loads of open source editors in the wild, and the actual layout of WP pages isn't that complex. WP doesn't have to deal with stupid fonts and colour changes, flash animations, or a host of other crap.

I personally don't like WYSIWYG editors. They dumb down the web publishing experience, and a dumbed down editor will result in dumbed down users. The only upside is that it'll allow Wikipedia to be more open by not requiring any skills or the patience to acquire skills.

That is totally stupid. WP has a page format that is completely dumb, there is no complication in the layout at all. Page after page are laid out exactly the same. The only thing that most users have to decide on is where a section break goes, where to add a reference, where to add bold and italic, and which section might need an image. Its not as if anyone is wrapping text and kerning around some arbitary figure, or micro adjusting the baseline of characters. And yet there is a completely bizarre syntax for putting something in bold, and mind fucked weirdness in linking to another page, or adding a picture.

Adding a picture is difficult, as you have to upload to commons and then put it in some kind of thumb box. The first is due to image copyright problems, and the second is mainly a matter of keeping up with image formatting and commentary.

I don't understand your problems with linking to another WP page: it's just [[links]] with brackets. It's not HTML, but I wouldn't call it mindfuckingly weird. Linking to a section of another page is a little harder, and needs to be done with a pipelink to the http address, perhaps the single most useful and "new" feature in MediaWiki markup.

Its different [[internal link]], [external link|blah-de-blah], [internal link|but stupid system don't thing it is, so you have to do it as if it were an externalk link]. That is just fuxored into the middle of next week.

That's not right. You can upload files to Wikipedia. Indeed, if you're claiming fair use rather than public domain or copyleft, you have to do that, as fair use isn't accepted on Commons. Nor do you have to make somethig a thumb, though it's a good idea because otherwise the image renders as enormous (a familiar problem here, of course) unless it was a very small file.

If you dumbed Wikipedians down any further they'd disappear in a puff of negative intelligence.