On 23/07/13 11:35, James Forrester wrote:
It would imply that this is a preference that
Wikimedia will support.
This would be a lie. We have always intended for VisualEditor to be a
wiki-level preference, and for this user-level preference to disappear once
the need for an opt-in (i.e., the beta roll-out to production wikis) is
over.
The feedback from established users [1] and the results from Aaron
Halfaker's study [2] suggest that opt-in would be the most appropriate
policy given VE's current level of maturity. That is, disable it by
default and re-enable the preference.
A proponent of source editing would claim that the steep learning
curve is justified by the end results. A visual editor is easier for
new users, but perhaps less convenient for power users. So Aaron
Halfaker's study took its measurements at the point in the learning
curve where you would expect the benefit of VE to be most clear: the
first edit. Despite the question being as favourable to VE as
possible, the result strongly favoured the use of source editing:
"Newcomers with the VisualEditor were ~43% less likely to save a
single edit than editors with the wikitext editor (x^2=279.4,
p<0.001), meaning that Visual Editor presented nearly a 2:1 increase
in editing difficulty."
On the Wikipedia RFC question "Wikimedia should disable this software
by default?", there were 30 support votes and 17 opposed. But many of
those 17 oppose votes assumed that VE is beneficial to new users. Now
that we know that that isn't the case, the amount of support for
enabling VE by default would surely be very small indeed. If it's not
beneficial for either established or new users, why have it?
It's not like the VE team are sitting around with no testing to do, no
features to add, and no bugs to work on. So the argument that you need
people looking at VE in order to provide feedback seems shallow.
Round-trip bugs, and bugs which cause a given wikitext input to give
different HTML in Parsoid compared to MW, should have been detected
during automated testing, prior to beta deployment. I don't know why
we need users to report them.
Perhaps the main problem is performance. Perhaps new users are
especially likely to quit on the first edit because they don't want to
wait 25-30 seconds for the interface to load (the time reported in
[3]). Performance is a very common complaint for established users also.
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC>
[2]
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_registered_editors/Results>
[3] <https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/VisualEditor_user_tests>
-- Tim Starling