Re: [Wikimediaau-l] Warning: Visual Editor - turn it on and it seems you can't turn it off!
VIsual editor was rolled out to soon, too many bugs not enough time to test which is a common issue. But all these issues and complaints are wasted if you just turn it off because we need to accept the change and learn to work with it otherwise how can we teach others to use it. you do have the ability to choose edit source which is the wiki coding anyway when your editing... its really not that much different to writing an email on gmail Gideon On 3 July 2013 13:57, John Vandenberg jay...@gmail.com wrote: On Wed, Jul 3, 2013 at 3:46 PM, K. Peachey p858sn...@gmail.com wrote: Can you file a bug about this bugzilla please? Where people that can actually work on it will see it? There are hundreds of bugzilla entries for Visual Editor. I'm pretty sure all the basic problems have been logged already. -- John Vandenberg ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l -- GN. Photo Gallery: http://gnangarra.redbubble.com Gn. Blogg: http://gnangarra.wordpress.com ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
[Wikimediaau-l] 2030 Strategic Plan for Victorian Public Libraries
For those of you with a taste for a bit of GLAM in your life, you might enjoy this 50+ page presentation of the 2030 strategic plan for Victorian Public Libraries http://www.plvn.net.au/sites/default/files/20130527%20FINAL%20VPL2030%20Full %20Report_web.pdf or you can settle for my quick summary and still have time to watch the Tour de France tonight: The focus will be on: * creativity, * collaboration * brain health * dynamic learning * community connection. Which will be manifested by libraries having fewer books (or at least fewer books on site) and a lot more spaces (see note below) and activities for creative pursuits and community engagements. For those of you in sunny Queensland, you will probably be aware of the changes at the State Library of Queensland that demonstrate this same trend, more auditoriums and meeting rooms, more lounge areas, the development of The Edge as a digital creativity space http://edgeqld.org.au/ musical events, yarning evenings, etc. For example in the past month or two at the State Library of Queensland, I've done 3D printing, feeding slime molds and transferring jellyfish DNA into bacteria to make it glow in the dark - it's a library with a lot more to offer than just books. And, as most of you are probably aware, SLQ has been partnering with WMAU in relation to image donations to Commons, regional edit training, etc. So for those of you in freezing Victoria, it looks like there are exciting times ahead in your public libraries. While the report is not about the State Library of Victoria as such, nonetheless SLV folk were very involved in the project so I am guessing that SLV's own future trajectory might be similar. So this could be a good time to explore if SLV or the Victorian Public Libraries might be interested in getting involved with WMAU as SLQ and SLNSW are doing. Kerry Note. Once buildings had rooms. Now buildings have spaces. The difference is that rooms have walls but spaces don't have walls. Spaces are the parts of rooms that extend to but do not include the walls. I am unsure if spaces have ceilings and floors. Probably spaces extend up and down to but not including the ceilings and floors. However, given the forces of gravity, physicists continue to recommend that library spaces should be immediately vertically positioned above a floor, physicists being very down-to-earth kind of folks. ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] 2030 Strategic Plan for Victorian Public Libraries
Thanks Kerry, I'm keen to respond in any way you thought appropriate if it meant realising this potential. I'm based on Melbourne at the moment, happy to run workshops, especially regional Victoria. On 03/07/2013 5:51 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote: ** ** For those of you with a taste for a bit of GLAM in your life, you might enjoy this 50+ page presentation of the 2030 strategic plan for Victorian Public Libraries ** ** http://www.plvn.net.au/sites/default/files/20130527%20FINAL%20VPL2030%20Full%20Report_web.pdf ** ** or you can settle for my quick summary and still have time to watch the Tour de France tonight: ** ** The focus will be on: - creativity, - collaboration - brain health - dynamic learning - community connection. ** ** Which will be manifested by libraries having fewer books (or at least fewer books on site) and a lot more “spaces” (see note below) and activities for creative pursuits and community engagements. For those of you in sunny Queensland, you will probably be aware of the changes at the State Library of Queensland that demonstrate this same trend, more auditoriums and meeting rooms, more lounge areas, the development of The Edge as a digital creativity space ** ** http://edgeqld.org.au/ ** ** musical events, yarning evenings, etc. For example in the past month or two at the State Library of Queensland, I’ve done 3D printing, feeding slime molds and transferring jellyfish DNA into bacteria to make it glow in the dark – it’s a library with a lot more to offer than just books. And, as most of you are probably aware, SLQ has been partnering with WMAU in relation to image donations to Commons, regional edit training, etc. ** ** So for those of you in freezing Victoria, it looks like there are exciting times ahead in your public libraries. While the report is not about the State Library of Victoria as such, nonetheless SLV folk were very involved in the project so I am guessing that SLV’s own future trajectory might be similar. So this could be a good time to explore if SLV or the Victorian Public Libraries might be interested in getting involved with WMAU as SLQ and SLNSW are doing. ** ** Kerry ** ** Note. Once buildings had rooms. Now buildings have spaces. The difference is that rooms have walls but spaces don’t have walls. Spaces are the parts of rooms that extend to but do not include the walls. I am unsure if spaces have ceilings and floors. Probably spaces extend up and down to but not including the ceilings and floors. However, given the forces of gravity, physicists continue to recommend that library spaces should be immediately vertically positioned above a floor, physicists being very down-to-earth kind of folks. ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] [wmau:members] Visual Editor - your thoughts?
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
Re: [Wikimediaau-l] 2030 Strategic Plan for Victorian Public Libraries
For myself (not a committee position or anything), I would like to see us roll out a general 1-hour presentation about Wikipedia for the public. So, not edit training, just stuff like stats about it, how its funded, how it operates, how vandalism is managed, what WMAU does, etc. I'd probably throw in some tips for the reader - I think there's a lot of stuff on a typical article screen that people don't realise the use of. Simple stuff like click on a photo to see it larger and see information about the photo, or the language links, or What links here, similar stuff (categories). As there is no hands-on to this, it can be delivered in any public library with a meeting space. The goal of the exercise would to be increase people's understanding of, use of, and hopefully respect for Wikipedia, and hopefully loosing their purse strings for the annual donation appeal. A general community upskilling (to use this buzzword of the month). We could also use this introductory seminar to promote any upcoming edit training events for anyone interested in that, but it wouldn't be the primary goal. If we had an off-the-shelf presentation available (or perhaps a set of modules that you could mix and match depending on the amount of time available), would people be willing to make contact with their local libraries and arrange to give such a presentation? I was seeing this as an almost no-collar-cost activity with Wikipedians presenting it in their local communities (of course there is a cost in time for all involved). Kerry _ From: Leigh Blackall [mailto:leighblack...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, 3 July 2013 8:22 PM To: kerry.raym...@gmail.com Cc: wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org; WMAu members Subject: Re: [Wikimediaau-l] 2030 Strategic Plan for Victorian Public Libraries Thanks Kerry, I'm keen to respond in any way you thought appropriate if it meant realising this potential. I'm based on Melbourne at the moment, happy to run workshops, especially regional Victoria. On 03/07/2013 5:51 PM, Kerry Raymond kerry.raym...@gmail.com wrote: For those of you with a taste for a bit of GLAM in your life, you might enjoy this 50+ page presentation of the 2030 strategic plan for Victorian Public Libraries http://www.plvn.net.au/sites/default/files/20130527%20FINAL%20VPL2030%20Full %20Report_web.pdf or you can settle for my quick summary and still have time to watch the Tour de France tonight: The focus will be on: * creativity, * collaboration * brain health * dynamic learning * community connection. Which will be manifested by libraries having fewer books (or at least fewer books on site) and a lot more spaces (see note below) and activities for creative pursuits and community engagements. For those of you in sunny Queensland, you will probably be aware of the changes at the State Library of Queensland that demonstrate this same trend, more auditoriums and meeting rooms, more lounge areas, the development of The Edge as a digital creativity space http://edgeqld.org.au/ musical events, yarning evenings, etc. For example in the past month or two at the State Library of Queensland, I've done 3D printing, feeding slime molds and transferring jellyfish DNA into bacteria to make it glow in the dark - it's a library with a lot more to offer than just books. And, as most of you are probably aware, SLQ has been partnering with WMAU in relation to image donations to Commons, regional edit training, etc. So for those of you in freezing Victoria, it looks like there are exciting times ahead in your public libraries. While the report is not about the State Library of Victoria as such, nonetheless SLV folk were very involved in the project so I am guessing that SLV's own future trajectory might be similar. So this could be a good time to explore if SLV or the Victorian Public Libraries might be interested in getting involved with WMAU as SLQ and SLNSW are doing. Kerry Note. Once buildings had rooms. Now buildings have spaces. The difference is that rooms have walls but spaces don't have walls. Spaces are the parts of rooms that extend to but do not include the walls. I am unsure if spaces have ceilings and floors. Probably spaces extend up and down to but not including the ceilings and floors. However, given the forces of gravity, physicists continue to recommend that library spaces should be immediately vertically positioned above a floor, physicists being very down-to-earth kind of folks. ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l ___ Wikimediaau-l mailing list Wikimediaau-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediaau-l
