The simplest way of learning wikicode (at least for those not previously familiar with html) is by imitation. When writing new articles, people at editothons understand the idea very easily. Making changes in existing article is another matter: if that's the goal, VE works better. (and I say that as a long term skeptic of VE)
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 7:58 PM, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Just noting that there are ongoing discussions on Lila's (not Leila's) talk page about the relative merits of Flow, wikimarkup, VE, improved wikimarkup, or some mix of options for talk pages: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:LilaTretikov_(WMF)
Pine
On Tue, Nov 3, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Leila Zia leila@wikimedia.org wrote:
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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