My short opinion is that it's promising, but it clearly needs work. It is
not ready for a global go-live yet, but its deployment seems to be driven
by considerations other than whether it's ready for Production use.
The good: From my work at outreach workshops, this is by a long shot the #1
requested feature for new users. We shouldn't underestimate what a
challenge getting to this point is from a software development perspective,
especially given how ad-hoc and inconsistent the template infrastructure
has become. For basic editing tasks, it's pretty good, and I'm sure once
it stabilises a bit new editors will take to it enthusiastically.
The bad: There are too many features missing for serious power-editing. In
particular, the code to add images and templates has been very inconsistent
for me, working some of the time and not at other times. It's good that
the referencing feature is built right in, but it's confusing to use, it
took me a bit to work out how to simply add a new reference, and it's also
strictly inferior to the excellent ProveIt tool (
http://proveit.wmflabs.org/), which appears not to be compatible with VE
yet. It's also slow and bloats the page size significantly, which will
likely be more of a problem for the Foundation's target editor groups in
developing countries than it is for me. The icons seem to be of the
mystery meat variety and
The ugly: I've removed it from my interface for now, but I'll probably give
it another try in a couple of months once the features have stabilised a
bit.
Cheers,
Craig
On 3 July 2013 16:03, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote:
For those of you who have taken the Visual Editor for a test drive, what
did you think?
** **
We have seen Gnangarra’s thoughts already and so I thought I’d share mine.
** **
To start, I should say that I sincerely believe that having a visual
editor should make editing Wikipedia much more accessible to those folk who
are used to Microsoft Word etc and not accustomed to seeing markup. I am
all in favour of this initiative. I have worked for many years using
WYSIWYG tools like Word (so-so) and FrameMaker (much better) and SeaMonkey
(beats raw HTML any day), so I don’t come into this discussion with a
mindset that “markup = good”, quite the opposite. As they say in The
Matrix, “why send a man to do a machine’s job?”.
** **
However, in its current state, I don’t think the VisualEditor (VE)
achieves its goal. There’s a few reasons:
** **
1. It doesn’t run on Internet Explorer, which is the out-of-the-box
browser when you have a Windows PC. The less tech-savvy a person is, the
more likely I think they are to have a Windows PC with IE. So, the very
people being targeted with the VE probably can’t use it because they have
the wrong browser.
** **
1. The functionality of the VE seems very limited. Yes, I can type
text. Yes, I make text bold/italic. Yes, I can make a heading. Yes I can
make a link if the name of the link will suffice as the text, e.g. [[dog]]
but not if I want [[dog|puppy]]. Or, at least, I could not work out how to
do it. Although the toolbar seems to suggest there is a way of working with
images, references and transclusions, I failed to be able to do anything at
all with them. Now, it may be that I am too conditioned by the existing
editor to be able to think in the new paradigm of the VE; perhaps what
should be done will be obvious to the less-conditioned newbie editor.
Although I am a bit uncertain that the newbie will know what “transclusion”
means; indeed I think if they do know what it means, then they would
already be familiar with markup.
** **
1. The VE cannot always be used. If you try to change the content of
an article with the VE, you will often get green-diagonal-stripes appearing
across the chunk you are trying to edit with a message that the Visual
Editor cannot edit that sort of material. You have to switch into Edit
Source (aka the existing markup editor) to work with it.
** **
I can see that if a newbie comes along (with the right brand of browser)
and clicks Edit for the first time because they’ve seen a spelling error or
want to add an extra sentence, then the VE should work for them, unless of
course they want to do it in a photo caption or inside a table or …. But,
as it stands, there is no real growth path for them to develop their
editing skills beyond such very simple changes. They either have to stay
locked into a world of very limited functionality or they have to click
Edit Source for the first time and deal with markup for the first time. I
guess the question that only time will be able to answer is whether the
transition to the markup editor is made in any way easier by the initial VE
experience as opposed to the previous situation where you were dropped
straight into editing markup. However, for even a
