Cost benefit analysis of various possible technical changes to Wikipedia
From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki
There seem to be no consistent process currently used to evaluate proposed changes.
The simplest way would be to analyse 
ratio.
By benefit we understand things like:
- new areas of knowledge being possible to write about without too much effort
- better high quality printing
- better accessibility
- enhanced ease of use
- opening possibilities for some further good changes
- ...
And by cost:
- breaking compatibility
- braking wikipedians' habits
- programming effort
- server load
- losing possibilities for some further good changes
- ...
Contents |
[edit] Moving everything to UTF-8
- Benefit: high
- new area of knowledge: linguistics
- making things easier: writing foreign proper names (like Wałęsa), interwiki links
- Cost: low
- just some compatibility stuff for ancient browsers
- Ratio: very high
[edit] SVG
- Benefit: high
- high quality printing
- opening possibilities: we will be able to write/use plugins that would output SVG
- Cost: moderate
- Ratio: high
[edit] autogenerating maps
- Benefit: high
- new area of knowledge
- high quality printing
- Cost: moderate
- Ratio: high
[edit] go/chess diagrams markup
- Benefit: moderate
- high quality printing
- new area of knowledge
- Cost: moderate
- Ratio: moderate
[edit] music markup support
- Benefit: moderate
- new area of knowledge
- better accessibility
- Cost: moderate
- Ratio: moderate
[edit] new table syntax
- Benefit: low
- a bit easier (things are very easy already, and hard stuff like complex tables won't become much easier anyway)
- Cost: high
- breaking compatibility
- breaking Wikipedians' habits
- programming effort & server load: making parser even more complex, and as it's regexp-based, making more parser errors possible
- Ratio: very low
