Comment by xyzzyz

I noticed the new editor. I can't say I'm a huge fan of it, but I did notice it.

I don't know how long ago they added the hover infoboxes, but I also noticed those. But that's a relatively small feature, at least from my perspective.

You shouldn't notice much of it.

Sysadmins are paid to make sure wikipedia doesn't have random downtime. Time spent on bugfixing should only be noticed if someone screws up.

If you want to see what people are doing - the git repo is public. https://github.com/wikimedia

Most of the development isn't reader facing. It's editor facing (WYSIWYG editor/etc, toolforge), community developer facing (wikimedia cloud services/toolforge/etc), improvements to the infrastructure (CDN data centers/DR/etc), wikidata improvements (which you see as a reader, but don't know you see as a reader), and lots of other things.

I'm pretty sure there's a public roadmap somewhere, and you could always follow through their bug system or PRs. Everything is developed in the open, even the infrastructure (disclaimer: I founded wikimedia cloud services, and opened up the infrastructure development).

I've noticed that now the language selector is a two seemingly random places depending on ?? (the classical places is on the left, an exhaustive list ordered alphabetically; the new place that is sometimes there is on the top right, in a drop down list, ordered by some obscure relevance metric).

How does the donation request get more annyoing each year?

I have noticed some changes like in how they handle media, but most of their development must be backend work because for the most part you shouldn't notice a bunch of changes. The site should be kept as simple and unobtrusive as possible. The only feature I really want them to have that they don't is dark mode.

wikimedia labs built a world-class setup with many new services and tech, for one example