I still do not use VE in my training (despite having 200+ students working on three campuses) because there are too many things it cannot do. I dont have time to constantly play with it to see if it is now good enough to use.  I will likely not use it until it is accepted by the wider community. However, the lack of a viable VE does make scalability very very difficult, especially with older teachers who adjust less to idea of coding in any form.

+1 on the frustrations for those with new accounts. I understand the need for protections with new accounts, but why in the heck does the captcha "error" message appear at the top and the captcha itself at the bottom? Students only see the red "error" and I have to tell them to go to the bottom and its only a captcha.  In addition, because we use wireless with the same IP address, we get errors when I am having a class move text into sandboxes or copy/paste finished articles into the mainspace. Most students cant use the move function as they dont have enough errors. Even if they did, using it would render the sandbox worthless because of the redirect. Add to this trigger-happy bibliotecarios in es.wiki who erase student work with little or no explanation, the last two times being wrongly done. 

Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2015 11:55:31 +0000
From: charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com
To: education@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia Education] Editor training with VisualEditor

On 22 February 2015 at 10:33, Filip Maljkoviæ <dungodung@gmail.com> wrote:
It is my impression that the VE should be ideally made in such a way that a tutorial isn't really necessary. But I guess we don't live in an ideal world :)

That is the "ideal world according to Silicon Valley", not the world we inhabit as Wikimedians. 

The projects want useful content, and how people write for Wikipedia matters much more than how they do on Facebook. The world of no manuals, no help pages, no support is not one in which we can easily grow our community of productive Wikimedians.

And the way the WMF releases software makes life very hard for trainers. 

It is literally true that you need to check the night before giving a workshop, with a new account, what the current experience for a newcomer to Wikipedia is (capchas, strange messages, moving buttons and all). 

I believe the latest WMUK training leaflet takes the VE as a given. I know their older leaflet on images mentions it, in a way found confusing to a newcomer (as I found - she was a Computer Officer).

Charles 


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