I have met some of them; they are smart and competent.
People's expectations about Wikipedia's development speed are all out of whack. The main problem is that Wikipedia is run on a shoestring compared with any other top site. A major contributing problem is that for much of Wikipedia's history it was run by a handful of people, all of them struggling mightily just to keep up with traffic growth. That means a lot of work has to go into paying down technical debt.
My comment about taking forever was not really to do with the lack of developer time (which, as a developer myself I totally understand!) but more about the difficulty of meshing two communities of people.
In much the same way that an outsider struggles to understand the Wikipedia system, many Wikipedians have difficulty understanding how development works, and how to interact with developers.
This disconnect means that requests for even simple things can take a while :)
I can highlight this disconnect; the idea given in the GP is smart and sensible and would help make the deletion review process a lot easier for newbies. This would certainly help with editor retention as well as being widely useful.
On the other hand, one dev recently wrote and deployed "WikiLove", which is a script for helping people give each other "Barnstar" awards.
Ok, so perhaps the GP's idea did not come up in discussions of "what should we improve next". But if the WP community proposed something like this it would probably sit gathering dust whilst the next WikiLove would appear on our screens.... :)
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors
I have met some of them; they are smart and competent.
People's expectations about Wikipedia's development speed are all out of whack. The main problem is that Wikipedia is run on a shoestring compared with any other top site. A major contributing problem is that for much of Wikipedia's history it was run by a handful of people, all of them struggling mightily just to keep up with traffic growth. That means a lot of work has to go into paying down technical debt.