[Wikimedia-l] Visual Editor "temporary" opt-out

[MZMcBride]

David Gerard wrote:
>That is, the arguments tend towards saying "you can't philosophically
>prove there aren't supporters!" This is unconvincing for a number of
>reasons.

This is lazy, but I'm going to quote myself.

---
VisualEditor is a big project that didn't simply happen in a vacuum. The
Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees (your Trustees) made it a top
priority, which is part of the reason that the Wikimedia Foundation made
it a top priority. Faced with a growing concern about editor retention and
the ability of anyone to be able to participate in the creation of the sum
of all human knowledge, a new endeavor was undertaken to make editing
easier for most users.

The _inability_ of many users to be able to contribute to the encyclopedia
(or the dictionary or the quote book or the ...) made this project a
necessity. While wikimarkup built Wikipedia and its sister projects,
there's a pretty prevalent view that wikimarkup alone cannot sustain it.
In 2013, there's an expectation on the part of users that there will be
some kind of visual editor (e.g., similar to that of WordPress), and so
the VisualEditor project was started in order to bring in such an editor,
side-by-side with the source editor.
---

I cannot and will not blame the Wikimedia Foundation for working on this
project. It's an important project and I believe this is a view that you
strongly agree with.

But it's similarly important that we recognize the current limitations to
on-wiki discussions and what we can glean from them.

MZMcBride