upvote
They have excess money as an org, why don’t they hire SWEs to improve it?
reply
My impression has been that the project has never been fully scoped and kind of bounced around between teams with nobody ever fully dedicated to seeing it through to completion. Scope creep and a whole lot of competing ideas, on top of a genuinely hard to solve set of problems has caused it to get put on the back burner more than once.

Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough.

reply
I should disclose that I am a former employee of Wikimedia, however, my impression is based solely on reading about the projects on publicly available project planning pages. That is, on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki and https://phabricator.wikimedia.org
reply