I have now used the visual editor for more than a hundred edits since the speed up. I
agree that the classic editor is generally faster and I suspect that will be especially
true for anyone editing large articles as V/E's still lacks section editing.
I like the way V/E supports infobox editing, one of the things I sometimes do is add
images to articles and with the classic editor you usually have the pain of having to
check the template documentation to find out what the parameters are for image and caption
(sadly and for no obvious reason these parameters are unlikely to be "image" and
"caption"). V/E is actually quite intuitive here in allowing you to run through
the unused parameters of the infobox.
Table editing is more nuanced, on the one hand there are handy looking options that come
up inviting you to delete or add columns or rows and I'm sure at some point I will
find an opportunity to use them. But editing the contents of a cell in a table is
challenging, not a task I would suggest to a newbie and far less intuitive than using the
classic editor.
Adding images from commons is really quite impressive in V/E, I haven't yet been in
the situation of having to work out which Newcastle V/E is prompting me with and it would
be good to know whether V/E is using wiki data links, keywords, geocodes or some
combination. But however it does it the images it has prompted me with so far have been
pretty good.
Not sure between Joe and Andy's positions re showing diffs. I have had very little to
do with the education program, but I appreciate for educators knowing how to look at the
contributions of a student is important. I think that V/E would be a better entry point
for technophobes whilst clearly the classic editor is better for the technoscenti. How you
recruit one or other group for an editathon without stereotyping is an interesting
conundrum. If you have access to a large mailing list of people who might be interested
then you could do two sorts of sessions, one emphasising that this was Wikipedia editing
for anyone, especially people who tried it in the past and found it technically arcane.
Another promising a session led by a "power user" showing how to be an effective
editor on Wikipedia perhaps billed as "this session is suitable for anyone with any
programming experience, however rusty or archaic".
Alternatively if you have a good ratio of experienced editors to newbies you can guard
people and show them the editor most suitable for them.
Regards
Jonathan
On 9 Aug 2015, at 01:03, Richard Farmbrough
<richard(a)farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
I guess when it is sufficiently fast that I don't have time to hit "edit
source" instead before it loads, I will start using it on other projects. Until
then, a good character editor beats a good WIMPS editor - pity it's not a good
character editor.
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