Wikipedia:Most smartest Wikimedia decisions

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This lists the most smartest decisions in the history of the Wikimedia movement. Candidates for the list have been nominated for many years, and the Top Ten decisions were finally ranked in July 2013.

Top 10 Most Smartest decisions edit

The top ten are (in order from best to almost best):

VisualEditor VisualEditor

VisualEditor

VisualEditor <nowiki/>VisualEditor <nowiki>[[VisualEditor]]</nowiki> [[File:Visual_Edi Visual Editor VisualEd<nowiki/>itor V<nowiki/>isualEditor VisualEditor<nowiki/> FLOW, to garbling talk-pages. Built entirely around VisualEditor. VisualEditor/Single Edit Tab. Intended to make VisualEditor the only edit link initially available to new users. (Deployment stalled as of 2018.) 2017 wikitext editor, built inside VisualEditor. Intended to gently encourage everyone into VisualEditor by eliminating any other option. Parser Unification, scheduled for 2019. To finally kill off the pesky old wikitext parser and render all pages using the VisualEditor engine instead. Note: This might cause some breakage of the wiki. Replacing Tidy and Lint cleanup drive to deliberately accelerate the breakage of hundreds of thousands or millions of pages into 2018, so no one realizes just how badly the VisualEditor Parser Unification breaks the wiki.

Other considerations edit

There are also plans to write a VisualEditor which actually works, and because WYSIWYG editors are extremely complex to run on multiple web browsers, there is the possibility of assigning one more person to help (part-time), but that is still in the planning stages, and the growing consensus is, "If it's already broke, why fix it?" and such.

Some have considered creating another product which does not work properly and could be even more confusing, such as garbling talk-pages and blocking typical discussions, as something which could interrupt the flow of ideas, delay the flow of news, or block the flow of information, but the product name has not yet been decided.^[1] Previous work along these lines was insufficiently liquid.

2015 Update: The foundation decided proceed with the above proposal to garble talk-pages. The project has been named FLOW, as previous work along these lines was insufficiently liquid.

^ This new interface look would make it exceptionally easy for new users to recognize that Wikipedia is not a forum.

Reception from Wikipedians edit

This section summarizes the reaction of many Wikipedians: "Huh?"

Other smartest decisions edit

It is possible the Image Filter was an even more smartest decision, with a serious chance of greatly increasing diversity in the online encyclopedia ecosphere. The switch from MonoBook to Vector as the default skin was also very smart; however, there is a critical loophole: users who prefer to view a page in MonoBook can switch their skin (or add ?useskin=monobook to the end of their URL when not logged in) - something the developers probably overlooked. Until this problem is patched, the default skin change probably won't make this list (except maybe an honorable mention.)

Done edit

ULS Done

VisualEditor Done

Renaming users Pending