Hey all,
This is our weekly software deployments update from the Editor Engagement Experiments team (e3).
This is our first week back from Wikimania, so there weren't a lot of big changes to go out. We did make one interesting alteration to the GettingStarted workflow though: the guided tour for GettingStarted now points to VisualEditor again.
Explanation follows...
Recently VisualEditor changed its configuration, from the edit buttons being [ edit | edit source ] everywhere to [ edit source | edit beta ]. In other words, making wikitext more prominent and labeling VE as a beta.
When that change happened, our GettingStarted guided tours automatically pointed at the primary edit button, which in this case had been changed to the wikitext source editor. We let that stand during Wikimania when deployments were frozen, but wanted to change it asap.
During July when the previous configuration existed, 67% of edits made via GettingStarted by new users (i.e. not autoconfirmed) were done with VE. This is strikingly higher than the general rate of edits made with VE, which during July seems to have hovered between 10-15% on an hourly basis.[1]
That data, plus the fact that GettingStarted grew slightly to above 3,000, leads us to conclude that VE is superior for first-time editors being asked to make simple changes like copyediting and adding wiki links. For the foreseeable future, we're going to be directing brand new editors to use VE, if possible. If their browser is blacklisted or they otherwise can't use VE, they'll get a tour of the basic mechanics of editing via wikitext.