Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Pine W]

Hi James,

Bumping this thread because I need a reply. (: Repeating my question: For
those that aren't using Flow, are there any improvements on the horizon for
the editing of talk pages, particularly for novice users? For example,
prompts or hints in the editing window regarding how to edit could be
helpful for novice talk page editors (and novice wikimarkup editors on
content pages as well).

Pine

On Sat, Jun 25, 2016 at 10:42 AM, Pine W  wrote:

> Thanks James. It would be nice if novice users who prefer VE for content
> pages didn't need to learn about wikimarkup for talk pages, or had a
> shallower learning curve. My understanding is that some wiki communities
> like Flow and others don't. For those that aren't using Flow, are there any
> improvements on the horizon for the editing of talk pages, particularly for
> novice users? For example, prompts or hints in the editing window regarding
> how to edit could be helpful for novice talk page editors (and novice
> wikimarkup editors on content pages as well).
>
> Pine
> On Jun 25, 2016 08:16, "James Forrester"  wrote:
>
>> On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:
>>
>> > 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow
>> feature
>> > development resume?
>> >
>>
>> ​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
>> urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
>> minor features.​
>>
>> We've not re-prioritised the Collaboration team's work on Flow, and we
>> won't do so very soon; the team this coming year are working on improving
>> the edit review process
>>  and the
>> notifications system. However, after that work is done there are some
>> often-requested areas for improvement in Flow which the team plan to
>> improve. For example, I know that the fixed threading of discussions is
>> irritating to some, and the lack of search is a serious issue. I know that
>> the use of Flow for individuals' talk pages as a Beta Feature on several
>> wikis has been quite popular, and given us a lot of feedback on how we can
>> do better. I look forward to discussing those priorities with everyone
>> nearer the time.
>>
>>
>> 2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
>> >
>>
>> ​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
>> aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to
>> use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions. ​To make it
>> usable
>> for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns
>> in
>> VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best
>> there. I do not think we will make writing reference materials easier,
>> simpler and faster by compromising on that.
>>
>>
>> 3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen
>> only
>> > in the context of integrating it into VE?
>> >
>>
>> ​Not really.​ ​The work on improving wikitext editing is mostly around the
>> wikitext mode inside the visual editor. The department is also working
>> more
>> widely on improvements to wikitext itself (like supporting the
>> TemplateStyles work, providing balanced templates, and replacing Tidy with
>> a modern parser), but they won't have a big impact on the existing
>> WikiEditor software.
>>
>>
>> ​Thanks for your questions. Happy to answer more. :-)​
>>
>> ​J.​
>> --
>> James D. Forrester
>> Lead Product Manager, Editing
>> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>>
>> jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
>> ___
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>> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
>> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
>> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
>> 
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
It is a matter of perspective. The persistence of the current talk system
makes for hardly readable discourse. So please continue with what is good
for some and not so much for others.
Thanks,
  GerardM

On 28 June 2016 at 18:27, Henning Schlottmann  wrote:

> On 25.06.2016 17:15, James Forrester wrote:
> > On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:
> >
> >> 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow
> feature
> >> development resume?
> >>
> >
> > ​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
> > urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
> > minor features.​
>
> Thanks for the confirmation. I would prefer you would scrap the whole
> project, but at least you are not doing anymore damage this way.
>
> > 2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
> >>
> >
> > ​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk
> pages
> > aren't content.
>
> Talk pages *are* content. Among other things. That's you basic mistake
> regarding Flow. On talk pages we need to copy content in order to
> discuss it, work on drafts and experiment with all elements of content,
> such as templates.
>
> Naked discussion is only the most primitive use of talk pages.
>
> So I would expect you to enable VE for use on talk pages. And I would
> expect you to make that an priority over almost every other software
> projects you have. That is because VE now is almost decent in articles
> and is not that far from being useful.
>
> Ciao Henning
>
>
>
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Henning Schlottmann]

On 25.06.2016 17:15, James Forrester wrote:
> On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:
> 
>> 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow feature
>> development resume?
>>
> 
> ​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
> urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
> minor features.​

Thanks for the confirmation. I would prefer you would scrap the whole
project, but at least you are not doing anymore damage this way.

> 2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
>>
> 
> ​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
> aren't content. 

Talk pages *are* content. Among other things. That's you basic mistake
regarding Flow. On talk pages we need to copy content in order to
discuss it, work on drafts and experiment with all elements of content,
such as templates.

Naked discussion is only the most primitive use of talk pages.

So I would expect you to enable VE for use on talk pages. And I would
expect you to make that an priority over almost every other software
projects you have. That is because VE now is almost decent in articles
and is not that far from being useful.

Ciao Henning



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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Pine W]

Thanks James. It would be nice if novice users who prefer VE for content
pages didn't need to learn about wikimarkup for talk pages, or had a
shallower learning curve. My understanding is that some wiki communities
like Flow and others don't. For those that aren't using Flow, are there any
improvements on the horizon for the editing of talk pages, particularly for
novice users? For example, prompts or hints in the editing window regarding
how to edit could be helpful for novice talk page editors (and novice
wikimarkup editors on content pages as well).

Pine
On Jun 25, 2016 08:16, "James Forrester"  wrote:

> On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:
>
> > 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow
> feature
> > development resume?
> >
>
> ​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
> urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
> minor features.​
>
> We've not re-prioritised the Collaboration team's work on Flow, and we
> won't do so very soon; the team this coming year are working on improving
> the edit review process
>  and the
> notifications system. However, after that work is done there are some
> often-requested areas for improvement in Flow which the team plan to
> improve. For example, I know that the fixed threading of discussions is
> irritating to some, and the lack of search is a serious issue. I know that
> the use of Flow for individuals' talk pages as a Beta Feature on several
> wikis has been quite popular, and given us a lot of feedback on how we can
> do better. I look forward to discussing those priorities with everyone
> nearer the time.
>
>
> 2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
> >
>
> ​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
> aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to
> use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions. ​To make it usable
> for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in
> VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best
> there. I do not think we will make writing reference materials easier,
> simpler and faster by compromising on that.
>
>
> 3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen only
> > in the context of integrating it into VE?
> >
>
> ​Not really.​ ​The work on improving wikitext editing is mostly around the
> wikitext mode inside the visual editor. The department is also working more
> widely on improvements to wikitext itself (like supporting the
> TemplateStyles work, providing balanced templates, and replacing Tidy with
> a modern parser), but they won't have a big impact on the existing
> WikiEditor software.
>
>
> ​Thanks for your questions. Happy to answer more. :-)​
>
> ​J.​
> --
> James D. Forrester
> Lead Product Manager, Editing
> Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
>
> jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
> ___
> Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
> New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
> 
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Johan Jönsson]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2016 at 11:17 AM, James Forrester
 wrote:
> All,
>
>
> TL;DR: The Editing Department is working to make the content editing
> software better. The big work areas are improving the visual editor and
> editing wikitext. We will bring in a wikitext mode inside the visual editor
> for simpler, faster switching. We will experiment with prompts to give
> users ideas for what they might want to make as they edit. We will do other
> things as well. Your feedback is welcome.
>
>
> I thought it would be helpful to send an update about editing software.
> It's been over a year since my last, and things change (and it's easy to
> lose track). We set out some higher-level objectives for Editing in the
> Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan for the coming financial year.[0] This
> gives a little more detail on that, with particular emphasis on the team
> working on content editing tools directly. There's also a brief, more
> feature-focussed roadmap available on MediaWiki.org if you are
> interested.[1]
>
> Status
>
> In Editing, we're continuing to work on our commission from the 2010
> community strategy[2] to create a rich visual editor which makes it
> possible to edit all our content, and participate in our workflows, without
> knowing or having to learn wikitext. This is a work in progress; as with
> all our improvements to the software, we will never be "done", and
> hopefully you notice improvements over time. Each week, new features,
> improvements, and bug fixes are released, often led, altered or supported
> by our volunteer developers and community pioneers; my thanks to you all.
>
> We are now roughly five years into this visual editor work, and have made
> good progress on a credible content editor for many users' workflows,
> helping editors spend more time on what they're editing instead of how.
> First and foremost, not having to think about the vagaries of wikitext and
> instead focus on the content of their writing is something that many new
> and experienced volunteers alike have mentioned they appreciate. The
> automatic citations tool makes adding new references to websites or DOIs
> much more quickly and thoroughly, improving the quality of the content. The
> visual media searching tool makes it simple to find and add more of the
> great images and other media on Commons and add to a page. Visual table
> editing helps make changes to tables, like moving columns or parts of
> tables around, much more easily than in wikitext, saving time of our
> volunteers to focus on their work making the wikis better.
>
> The visual editor supports many (but not yet all) of our content languages,
> and thanks to community support and engagement the editor is available by
> default on over 235 Wikipedias (and for opt-in use on the remaining 55),
> including almost all of our largest Wikipedias. It is on by default for
> logged-out users and new accounts on 233 of these, and on for new accounts
> (but not yet for logged-out users) on two, English and Spanish. As of this
> week, this now includes representatives from each of the "CJK" language
> group, with four different Chinese script languages (Classical, Cantonese
> and Wu, as well as Min Nan), Korean and Japanese. We're currently working
> our way through each of the remaining communities asking them if it's OK to
> switch; the next groups will be the thirteen Arabic script Wikipedias and
> the twenty-three Indic Wikipedias. You can see specific details at the
> rollout grid if you're interested.[3]
>
> We have recently been working with the non-Wikipedia sister projects. As
> you might imagine, each project has different needs, workflows and
> concerns, and it's important to us that we ensure the tools we provide are
> tweaked as appropriate to support, not undermine, those requirements to the
> extent justifiable by demand. Per community request, the visual editor is
> already available to all users on several different sister projects, but we
> think there is more to do for some before we encourage this more widely.
> Recently, we have been working with the communities on the Wikivoyages,
> which are quite similar to the Wikipedias in needs from the visual editor;
> our thanks to the patience and assistance from the Wikivoyagers. We're also
> working with User:tpt and other volunteers who create and maintain the
> software used by Wikisources to adapt the visual editor to work with those
> features; our thanks to them, and to Wikisourcerers more widely.
>
> Core and maintenance work
>
> Despite this progress, there are still several areas in which the core
> functionality of the editing software needs extensions, improvements and
> fixes. In many places within the visual editor software we have to work
> around browsers' bugs, missing features and idiosyncrasies, and nowhere is
> that more problematic than the critical areas of typing, cursoring, and
> related language support. There continue to be irritating, 

Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[James Forrester]

On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W  wrote:

> 1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow feature
> development resume?
>

​Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
minor features.​

We've not re-prioritised the Collaboration team's work on Flow, and we
won't do so very soon; the team this coming year are working on improving
the edit review process
 and the
notifications system. However, after that work is done there are some
often-requested areas for improvement in Flow which the team plan to
improve. For example, I know that the fixed threading of discussions is
irritating to some, and the lack of search is a serious issue. I know that
the use of Flow for individuals' talk pages as a Beta Feature on several
wikis has been quite popular, and given us a lot of feedback on how we can
do better. I look forward to discussing those priorities with everyone
nearer the time.


2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
>

​No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to
use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions. ​To make it usable
for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in
VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best
there. I do not think we will make writing reference materials easier,
simpler and faster by compromising on that.


3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen only
> in the context of integrating it into VE?
>

​Not really.​ ​The work on improving wikitext editing is mostly around the
wikitext mode inside the visual editor. The department is also working more
widely on improvements to wikitext itself (like supporting the
TemplateStyles work, providing balanced templates, and replacing Tidy with
a modern parser), but they won't have a big impact on the existing
WikiEditor software.


​Thanks for your questions. Happy to answer more. :-)​

​J.​
-- 
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.

jforres...@wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[Pine W]

Hi James,

Thanks for the update.

Questions:

1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and when would Flow feature
development resume?

2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?

3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen only
in the context of integrating it into VE?

Thanks!

Pine
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Re: [Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[David Gerard]

On 23 June 2016 at 10:17, James Forrester  wrote:

> TL;DR: The Editing Department is working to make the content editing
> software better. The big work areas are improving the visual editor and
> editing wikitext. We will bring in a wikitext mode inside the visual editor
> for simpler, faster switching. We will experiment with prompts to give
> users ideas for what they might want to make as they edit. We will do other
> things as well. Your feedback is welcome.



I see this isn't a blog post yet, and it should be!


- d.

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[Wikimedia-l] Status update about editing software, June 2016

[James Forrester]

All,


TL;DR: The Editing Department is working to make the content editing
software better. The big work areas are improving the visual editor and
editing wikitext. We will bring in a wikitext mode inside the visual editor
for simpler, faster switching. We will experiment with prompts to give
users ideas for what they might want to make as they edit. We will do other
things as well. Your feedback is welcome.


I thought it would be helpful to send an update about editing software.
It's been over a year since my last, and things change (and it's easy to
lose track). We set out some higher-level objectives for Editing in the
Wikimedia Foundation's annual plan for the coming financial year.[0] This
gives a little more detail on that, with particular emphasis on the team
working on content editing tools directly. There's also a brief, more
feature-focussed roadmap available on MediaWiki.org if you are
interested.[1]

Status

In Editing, we're continuing to work on our commission from the 2010
community strategy[2] to create a rich visual editor which makes it
possible to edit all our content, and participate in our workflows, without
knowing or having to learn wikitext. This is a work in progress; as with
all our improvements to the software, we will never be "done", and
hopefully you notice improvements over time. Each week, new features,
improvements, and bug fixes are released, often led, altered or supported
by our volunteer developers and community pioneers; my thanks to you all.

We are now roughly five years into this visual editor work, and have made
good progress on a credible content editor for many users' workflows,
helping editors spend more time on what they're editing instead of how.
First and foremost, not having to think about the vagaries of wikitext and
instead focus on the content of their writing is something that many new
and experienced volunteers alike have mentioned they appreciate. The
automatic citations tool makes adding new references to websites or DOIs
much more quickly and thoroughly, improving the quality of the content. The
visual media searching tool makes it simple to find and add more of the
great images and other media on Commons and add to a page. Visual table
editing helps make changes to tables, like moving columns or parts of
tables around, much more easily than in wikitext, saving time of our
volunteers to focus on their work making the wikis better.

The visual editor supports many (but not yet all) of our content languages,
and thanks to community support and engagement the editor is available by
default on over 235 Wikipedias (and for opt-in use on the remaining 55),
including almost all of our largest Wikipedias. It is on by default for
logged-out users and new accounts on 233 of these, and on for new accounts
(but not yet for logged-out users) on two, English and Spanish. As of this
week, this now includes representatives from each of the "CJK" language
group, with four different Chinese script languages (Classical, Cantonese
and Wu, as well as Min Nan), Korean and Japanese. We're currently working
our way through each of the remaining communities asking them if it's OK to
switch; the next groups will be the thirteen Arabic script Wikipedias and
the twenty-three Indic Wikipedias. You can see specific details at the
rollout grid if you're interested.[3]

We have recently been working with the non-Wikipedia sister projects. As
you might imagine, each project has different needs, workflows and
concerns, and it's important to us that we ensure the tools we provide are
tweaked as appropriate to support, not undermine, those requirements to the
extent justifiable by demand. Per community request, the visual editor is
already available to all users on several different sister projects, but we
think there is more to do for some before we encourage this more widely.
Recently, we have been working with the communities on the Wikivoyages,
which are quite similar to the Wikipedias in needs from the visual editor;
our thanks to the patience and assistance from the Wikivoyagers. We're also
working with User:tpt and other volunteers who create and maintain the
software used by Wikisources to adapt the visual editor to work with those
features; our thanks to them, and to Wikisourcerers more widely.

Core and maintenance work

Despite this progress, there are still several areas in which the core
functionality of the editing software needs extensions, improvements and
fixes. In many places within the visual editor software we have to work
around browsers' bugs, missing features and idiosyncrasies, and nowhere is
that more problematic than the critical areas of typing, cursoring, and
related language support. There continue to be irritating, occasionally
serious bugs related to these, for which we continue to partner with
browser vendors and experts around the Web to try to develop workarounds
and improvements.

Another important area related to language support is coming up with