On 12/13/2011 10:27 PM, Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
Here's the demo, where you can edit some canned
texts (but not actual
Wikipedia articles, yet):
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox
Something that looks like a working prototype is exactly where
LiquidThreads were two years ago, and we got all excited and
wanted so hard to try this for the Swedish community, and asked
to have it installed first in the Swedish Wikisource. We had to
wait for months until it was finally made available. But this
enthusiasm turned out to be a really big mistake. It never
worked, and the WMF never invested any effort in fixing the
problems. At last, in October this year, we gave up and are now
using old-style talk pages for all discussions again. This most
painful experience will make me advocate against any attempt
to use the Swedish projects as a pilot to try out the new visual
editor. I do mistakes, but I learn from them.
Your timeline (
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Visual_editor) does
mention the WMF annual plan for 2011-2012,
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/2011-2012_Annual_Plan_Questions_and_Ans…
which states "first small wiki default deployment by June 2012."
But the important part is the plan for the year 2012-2013, and
what effort and budget the WMF will spend on rescuing the roll-out,
even in the casethe main developers suddenly leave the project.
My mistake, from which I learned, was that I didn't ask for that
kind of plan, when I first heard about LiquidThreads. I couldn't
imagine that such a major usability improvement as getting rid
of indented talk pages could be a zero priority for the WMF, one
that was allowed to depend on the personal schedule of a single
main developer. Even today, as we lament the decline in
contributors, how can it not be important to fix LiquidThreads?
--
Lars Aronsson (lars(a)aronsson.se)
Aronsson Datateknik -
http://aronsson.se