I've been doing this in Israel for a while already. (In Hebrew! From right
to left! Thanks to User:Mooeypoo [cced], she is awesome!)
It's pretty successful.
Basic formatting, headings, and citations are far, far easier to explain
using VE.
I do *mention* the source editor, because it's inevitable for understanding
talk pages and diffs, but I dedicate far less time to it than I did at
workshops three years ago. This leaves more time to do actual article
writing. Some people actually stay as editors afterwards (sorry, I don't
have a precise number).
I'm doing this every three or four months or so, and it's amazing to see
the progress and the bug-fixing. A year ago writing an image description
was broken in Hebrew - now it works. A year ago it was impossible to add
tables - now it's not just possible, but easy. A year ago it was weird to
add footnotes - now it's much nicer; not perfect, but already better than
explaining <ref> tags (for a lot of newbies seeing ANY tags at all is an
immediate showstopper that renders the whole workshop useless). Using VE in
workshops is also great for finding and reporting useful bugs - looking at
new users always is.
Wikimedia Israel also uses VE for most of the training materials that it
produces in the last year or so.
--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-07-30 15:00 GMT+03:00 David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com>om>:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers(a)gmail.com>
Date: 30 July 2015 at 12:57
Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] visual Editor is now worth using in outreach
editathons
To:
If anyone is still running outreach editathons to try and recruit new
editors, you might want to consider using visual editor. I spoke to
some of the WMF people at Wikimania and apparently the issue of it
running very very slowly on old kit has recently been largely
addressed. I've pointed out in the past that as long as that bug was a
"won't fix" you couldn't promote Visual Editor at outreach editathons
because even if all the laptops look pretty new, there could well be
someone present using a borrowed laptop and intending to use an old PC
at home. Since we really can't start an editathon asking the attendees
if they all use new computers at home, and then reverting to the
classic editor if someone says their machine was bought in 2010 I and
several others have been ignoring the Visual Editor for the last
couple of years.
I have just run a quick test on this myself using a friend's old PC
and V/E does now work, though it is still a little slower than the
classic editor.
Regards
Jonathan / WereSpielChequers
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia UK mailing list
wikimediauk-l(a)wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l
WMUK:
https://wikimedia.org.uk
_______________________________________________
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines
Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
<mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>