Re: [Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
On 25 July 2013 06:29, James Salsman jsals...@gmail.com wrote: Why not make the visual editor the default with opt-out for 5% of newly registered editors and anonymous IP page loads, and opt-in for everyone else until there is evidence that it is not decreasing the number of edits? Meant to reply to this earlier and it got lost: I think there's a problem with any kind of A/B testing on the main site interface for more than small changes - it's that we only have one set of documentation. Wikipedia's help pages (certainly on enwiki) aren't amazing, but they are used, and people will fall back to them if they have problems using the site. Having a substantially different editing interface for a fraction of users means that there's now one more layer of confusion before (some or all) people can get help, probably leading to more abandoned edits *compared to all-in VE with documentation*. So the results would be skewed downwards; it might be a small effect, but if we're looking for a statistical difference on 5% of new edits, it might be enough to give a spurious negative result. Again, I don't think A/B testing is inherently bad, but we'd need to test an integrated environment. Where people aren't going to consult help pages (say, the login page) it's much simpler. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
Op 2013/08/03 6:58, Andrew Gray schreef: I think there's a problem with any kind of A/B testing on the main site interface for more than small changes - it's that we only have one set of documentation. Wikipedia's help pages (certainly on enwiki) aren't amazing, but they are used, and people will fall back to them if they have problems using the site. That's one of the biggest chicken-and-egg problems in this whole deployment: those help pages are exclusively maintained by editors. Until there's a substantial body of volunteers that believe that updating the help pages to match VE is a worthwhile endeavour, the pages will remain at the current version, which means that all new editors can only get help if they don't use VE. That makes it hard to ever find a group of people that thinks updating the documentation is worth the effort. KWW ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
On 3 August 2013 17:51, Kevin Wayne Williams kwwilli...@kwwilliams.com wrote: That's one of the biggest chicken-and-egg problems in this whole deployment: those help pages are exclusively maintained by editors. Until there's a substantial body of volunteers that believe that updating the help pages to match VE is a worthwhile endeavour, the pages will remain at the current version, which means that all new editors can only get help if they don't use VE. That makes it hard to ever find a group of people that thinks updating the documentation is worth the effort. At the moment we seem to have a marvellous inconsistency (perhaps this is A/B testing help pages...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tutorial/Editing - new environment, noting both and recommending VE, but only updated 9th July https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Editing - old style, with 135 word (!) notice at the top about VE I wonder sometimes if maintaining help/documentation pages would be a sensible thing for WMF to have a (part?) time staffer working on, but I guess this gets into the muddy area of paying people for volunteer tasks -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
On 3 August 2013 18:46, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: I wonder sometimes if maintaining help/documentation pages would be a sensible thing for WMF to have a (part?) time staffer working on, but I guess this gets into the muddy area of paying people for volunteer tasks The trouble is (1) there's ten years' volunteer effort in the old how-to pages, (2) the VE interface isn't even finished yet (I certainly hope it isn't, anyway) (3) to the extent the VE needs a manual, it's not a good interface. - d. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
On 3 August 2013 18:50, David Gerard dger...@gmail.com wrote: On 3 August 2013 18:46, Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk wrote: I wonder sometimes if maintaining help/documentation pages would be a sensible thing for WMF to have a (part?) time staffer working on, but I guess this gets into the muddy area of paying people for volunteer tasks The trouble is (1) there's ten years' volunteer effort in the old how-to pages, (2) the VE interface isn't even finished yet (I certainly hope it isn't, anyway) (3) to the extent the VE needs a manual, it's not a good interface. Yes and no. *Wikipedia* needs an interface manual. The standard page has twenty visible interface links, another sixteen or so in collapsible sidebar sections, ten in the footer, however many language links, and goodness knows what else from sitenotices or boxes on the page itself. The actual mechanism you use to edit is almost secondary to this problem, but if you've gone back to a manual in order to find so, how do I do this, you're going to get really thrown if there's two buttons where it says there's one, or if you don't get the wall of weird text it's told you the editing page looks like... etc etc. -- - Andrew Gray andrew.g...@dunelm.org.uk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] a compromise proposal for visual editor dogfooding
Why not make the visual editor the default with opt-out for 5% of newly registered editors and anonymous IP page loads, and opt-in for everyone else until there is evidence that it is not decreasing the number of edits? ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
