User:Deltahedron/work1

I'm primarily interested in the sustainability and development of mathematics rendering and editing. Here's a suggestion I posted recently:

Probably the disconnect between WMF broadly and WMF paid staff in particular on the one hand, and mathematics content editors at the various language Wikipedias and the English in particular, will persist while WMF continues in a state of having, as we understand, no plan for mathematics rendering and editing. In the absence of a plan, there is no focus for any discussion, and interaction becomes nothing but a matter of unplanned actions by developers and reactions by editors. What success looks like to me includes (but is not restricted to) WMF having a plan for sustaining and developing mathematics-related software which has been proactively shown to the mathematics editors, sanity-checked, commented on, improved and (ideally) agreed by the latter, with development by volunteers and paid staff supported by tools and processes, a roadmap that shows WMF when and where paid effort is needed to complement volunteer effort, volunteers knowing what is being asked for, what the priorities are and where the various products are in their life cycles, all of this being visible in a reasonably stable and well-known location for any editors who are or want or need to be involved. The various mathematics project pages would have stable links to those locations, and regular push notifications of major successes, failures and changes of plan, invitations to participate in strategic planning discussions, venues to take part in those discussions, and tools to support decision-making. I'm using mathematics here just as an example, although it's the only one I'm personally interested in: there are numerous analogous communities with various specialised textual and editing requirements such as musical, chemical, linguistic, bibliographic or genetic notations; mathematical and chemical diagrams; right-to-left texts; scripts with other non-linear or context-dependent rendering; and so forth.

Executive summary: the Wikimedia Foundation to, in consultation with community, create a comprehensive roadmap for developing specialized software, filling in gaps that volunteers do not pick up for development.