Thanks Risker, I think you've summarized the position of many experienced users. 100% agreed.
Nico On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 8:14 AM, Risker <risker...@gmail.com> wrote: > The numbers are important. And perhaps what isn't being reflected well > here is the genuine disappointment felt by so many in the enwiki community; > there was more excitement about this project than probably any other that > WMF has undertaken in the past 5 years. The sudden leap from > feature-deficient alpha to deployment as default with untested major > features eroded a great deal of the goodwill the community had for this > much-requested feature. There still isn't any good explanation of why it > didn't go alpha --> opt-in beta with the referencing and templates --> > debug, debug, debug --> default deployment. It may not be coming through > very clearly, but the editorial community *does* want this to work, and > there's a lot of disappointment with what they got. > > This was an error in judgment, but it does not need to be a fatal one. The > important thing is to do some learning and apply it. Hold off on deploying > this software as default editor on other projects until more of the bugs > (especially performance related bugs) are resolved, but proceed with opt-in > beta on more projects. They'll find bugs that enwiki hasn't found, and > those bugs will be found by editors who are interested and motivated to > test all kinds of use cases. Enable the opt-out button as a preference on > enwiki, and give thought to making it not-default for IPs and new users. > English Wikipedia has still paid the price of being the primary launch > site, but there's no point in compounding it by making VisualEditor the > default for all projects and all editors. > > The knock-on effects of this problematic deployment will be felt for a long > time, particularly its impact on other products that need VisualEditor to > be widely accepted by the community to succeed (such as Flow). The > portrayal of editors (and now volunteer and staff developers and engineers) > as simply not understanding, or having unreasonable expectations, is not > realistic. This was ready for beta testing on July 1; it wasn't ready for > deployment to default. Your own internal memoranda (as can be seen by some > of the links provided in this thread) indicate serious problems with > performance. The publicly available data on Limn[1] is consistently > showing less than 10% adoption by experienced users, and only 12% of all > edits being done using VE. > > Please reconsider the course of action. There is no benefit in putting > other projects through this when you have more than enough issues to fix. > > Risker > > > > [1]http://ee-dashboard.wmflabs.org/datasources > > > > On 23 July 2013 00:01, David Cuenca <dacu...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > I'm glad that Tim is bringing some facts and numbers that back up what > the > > community is demanding. > > To do otherwise will be to play tug-of-war which will lead to an even > worse > > outcome. > > > > Besides of enabling the preference, a good approach would be to activate > or > > deactivate that preference depending on how much an user has been using > (or > > not) Visual Editor in their last edits and to ask new users if they want > to > > use VE or the plain text system. "New users" are not that new, since many > > of them have been editing anonymously before. > > > > When there are more compelling reasons to do the switch (like real-time > > collaboration), users can have a higher incentive to do the switch. > > > > Micru > > > > On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 11:44 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org > > >wrote: > > > > > On 23/07/13 11:35, James Forrester wrote: > > > > It would imply that this is a preference that Wikimedia will support. > > > > This would be a lie. We have always intended for VisualEditor to be a > > > > wiki-level preference, and for this user-level preference to > disappear > > > once > > > > the need for an opt-in (i.e., the beta roll-out to production wikis) > is > > > > over. > > > > > > The feedback from established users [1] and the results from Aaron > > > Halfaker's study [2] suggest that opt-in would be the most appropriate > > > policy given VE's current level of maturity. That is, disable it by > > > default and re-enable the preference. > > > > > > A proponent of source editing would claim that the steep learning > > > curve is justified by the end results. A visual editor is easier for > > > new users, but perhaps less convenient for power users. So Aaron > > > Halfaker's study took its measurements at the point in the learning > > > curve where you would expect the benefit of VE to be most clear: the > > > first edit. Despite the question being as favourable to VE as > > > possible, the result strongly favoured the use of source editing: > > > > > > "Newcomers with the VisualEditor were ~43% less likely to save a > > > single edit than editors with the wikitext editor (x^2=279.4, > > > p<0.001), meaning that Visual Editor presented nearly a 2:1 increase > > > in editing difficulty." > > > > > > On the Wikipedia RFC question "Wikimedia should disable this software > > > by default?", there were 30 support votes and 17 opposed. But many of > > > those 17 oppose votes assumed that VE is beneficial to new users. Now > > > that we know that that isn't the case, the amount of support for > > > enabling VE by default would surely be very small indeed. If it's not > > > beneficial for either established or new users, why have it? > > > > > > It's not like the VE team are sitting around with no testing to do, no > > > features to add, and no bugs to work on. So the argument that you need > > > people looking at VE in order to provide feedback seems shallow. > > > > > > Round-trip bugs, and bugs which cause a given wikitext input to give > > > different HTML in Parsoid compared to MW, should have been detected > > > during automated testing, prior to beta deployment. I don't know why > > > we need users to report them. > > > > > > Perhaps the main problem is performance. Perhaps new users are > > > especially likely to quit on the first edit because they don't want to > > > wait 25-30 seconds for the interface to load (the time reported in > > > [3]). Performance is a very common complaint for established users > also. > > > > > > > > > [1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC> > > > > > > [2] > > > < > > > > > > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/Results > > > > > > > > > > [3] <https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor_user_tests> > > > > > > -- Tim Starling > > > > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > > > > > > > > > -- > > Etiamsi omnes, ego non > > _______________________________________________ > > Wikitech-l mailing list > > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
