Cost benefit analysis of various possible technical changes to Wikipedia

There seem to be no consistent process currently used to evaluate proposed changes.

The simplest way would be to analyse ${\frac {\mbox{benefit}}{\mbox{cost}}}$ 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
• ...

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

SVG

• Benefit: high
  • high quality printing
  • opening possibilities: we will be able to write/use plugins that would output SVG
• Cost: moderate
• Ratio: high

autogenerating maps

• Benefit: high
  • new area of knowledge
  • high quality printing
• Cost: moderate
• Ratio: high

go/chess diagrams markup

• Benefit: moderate
  • high quality printing
  • new area of knowledge
• Cost: moderate
• Ratio: moderate

music markup support

• Benefit: moderate
  • new area of knowledge
  • better accessibility
• Cost: moderate
• Ratio: moderate

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