On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 9:11 AM, Jonathan Morgan jmorgan@wikimedia.org wrote:
Aaron Halfaker ran a study of whether VE affected new editor retention in May: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:VisualEditor%27s_effect_on_newly_re...
He didn't find any difference in short term survival or productivity between VE and wikitext.
To add to Jonathan's comment: Whether no difference in short term survival and productivity is a positive or negative result is application dependent, but for your specific use case, John, it can be considered a positive result. Basically, you can train people with a method that is easier to learn and use without negatively affecting their short term survival and productivity.
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 8:46 AM, john cummings mrjohncummings@gmail.com wrote:
I'm sure there are many ways you could explore this subject, my specific interest is when running editor training would it be better to teach people to use VE or wikitext?
If you decide to teach VE, you will still need to teach people some level of wikitext operations since they will need to be able to communicate in Talk pages, for example. (correct me if I'm wrong).
I'd train them with VE but also teach them wikitext for the purposes of the talk page, Teahouse, etc. conversations. I'd also tell them that at some point in their Wikipedia career, they may need to learn more about wikitext, but that they can decide later, when/if the need arises. (If people you're training have academic backgrounds, the (not so 1-to-1) comparison between LaTeX and Word can help. You'll learn both in many fields and you use each of them for certain use cases.)
Best, Leila
Many thanks
John
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