[Wikimedia-l] Let's have the courage to sit down and talk about VisualEditor

Thu Aug 1 16:36:49 UTC 2013

Op 2013/08/01 0:00, Erik Moeller schreef:
It's the constant minimization of issues that's the most annoying, Erik. 
Reading through your response, you'd think that I was some kind of picky 
person with irrationally high expectations. Nothing could be further 
from the truth.
>> If you had followed that, and understood that the Minimum Viable Product
>> included cut-and-paste, table editing, and maybe the ability to successfully
>> and completely edit the hundred or so most edited articles out of all the
>> millions, you wouldn't have hit the level of pushback you've encountered.
> Couple of diffs from a few minutes ago of table edits:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Major_League_Soccer&curid=71802&diff=566676293&oldid=566669395
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_True_Blood_characters&curid=23290782&diff=566675268&oldid=565993704
>
> That's not just plain vanilla tables, but tables with inline CSS
> specified by hand, templates inside cells, etc. No roundtripping
> issues or other problems as far as I can tell.
The editor was able to change a 4 to a 5 in an existing table, that's 
true. Could that editor add a row? No. Add a column? No. Delete a row or 
a column? No. Are all of those operations part of the bare minimum 
feature set for "table editing"? Absolutely.
>
> The kind of table you want us to make work well is this type:
>
> <onlyinclude>{| class="wikitable" style="margin: auto; width: 100%"
> |-
> ! colspan="2" rowspan="2" style="width:3%;"|Season
> ! rowspan="2" style="width:5%;"|Episodes
> ! colspan=2|Originally aired
> ! colspan=2|DVD release
> |-
> (...)
> | style="background:green; color:#134; text-align:center;"|
> | style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| '''[[List of Big Time Rush
> episodes#Film|Film]]'''
> | style="text-align:center;" colspan="2"| {{Start date|2012|3|10}}
> | style="text-align: center; top" {{N/a}}
> | style="text-align: center; top" {{N/a}}
>
> which injects this kind of template:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Template:N/a&action=edit
>
> In other words, a table partially constructed out of table cell templates.
It's not that *I* want them to work well. If you look over the whole pop 
music area, you will find that most recent articles in that area include 
at least one of {{Certification Table Top}}, {{Singlechart}}, 
{{Albumchart}}, or one of the {{won}}, {{lost}}, {{n/a}} group. Those 
templates all failed, and all failed because of *different* bugs.

>
> Now, I understand that you've dealt with dirty diffs
It's not "dirty diffs": the articles get converted to gibberish on 
saves: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_Big_Time_Rush_episodes&diff=565906957&oldid=565898974 

Wholesale destruction of articles is *not* a "dirty diff".
> ... it's not a trivial issue.
But it's certainly one that you knew was broken before you released
> ...
>
> As for copy-and-paste, yes, it's pretty wonky still, and I'm sure
> causes a fair bit of frustration for first-time VE users who have no
> experience with wikitext. However, it is there within a VE session,
> and we see very few diffs where users are causing problems due to
> broken copy-and-paste. Does that not match your experience? I've just
> inspected another round of 100 diffs and didn't see a single
> copy-and-paste related issue. Contrary to Andreas' claim, copying
> references isn't completely broken, but the bug is pretty nasty when
> it hits, so we'll get it fixed soon.
I'm trying to generate an experience right now. So far I'm at 11 minutes 
of CPU time trying to save the results, so not having diffs is 
relatively unsurprising: if I wasn't braced for this, I would have 
killed my browser and started over 8 minutes ago.

Wow ... 34 minutes of solid CPU time and the thing still hasn't saved. 
I'll get back to the rest of the e-mail and hope it's done before I have 
to leave the house.

Just crossed the one hour mark for CPU time, so I'll look back at this 
e-mail when I'm done with my morning errands ...

At two hours and five minutes of solid CPU time, I'm going to crash my 
browser and try a smaller test. Suffice it to say that a basic test plan 
like "open the article about Lady Gaga in one edit window, paste the 
results in another edit window, and save the results" was not a smashing 
success. Corrupted the article format and could not save.

OK, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Kww/pastetest2 shows the results 
of copying the second paragraph from 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Gaga?veaction=edit and pasting it into 
a second edit window. That's *broken*. Inexcusably broken. Copying text 
from one article and pasting it into another successfully is a test case 
that doesn't require a firehose test to detect, and it certainly is a 
part of the Minimum Viable Product.
>
>
>
> But I don't want to argue with you - I'm just saying things are a bit
> more complex and nuanced.
The problem is that you "do" continue to argue when you shouldn't. Has 
your team accomplished a lot? Absolutely. But your definition of Minimum 
Viable Product was so far off the mark that it caused the perception 
that what you had wasn't worth testing. That's why the pushback was so 
loud and so hard.

KWW