I ran my first training session using the Visual Editor this morning and hit
what appeared to be a show-shopping bug. It appeared that the two new users
(thankfully I had only 2) could not create a citation. They found themselves
in an infinite loop of Save Page with Capcha when they tried to create a
citation.
By the end of the session, I managed to refine the bug to a combination of
"new user", "new article" (although created by me, not the new users),
and
citations involving a live URL, duly reported at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Feedback#New_users_unab
le_to_create_citation_with_a_live_external_link_in_it
Ironically it first happened on their newly created User Pages where we were
practising our new Wikipedia skills because tackling "real articles". Then
on the "real articles" I had created earlier for them to use (a training
approach that has the benefit of not unleashing a horde of angry
watchlisters when they make some silly mistake, which occurs if you let new
people make their early edits on "popular articles"). (Spot the pattern,
both were new articles!).
Now if this had happened to a new user sitting at home, they would have been
stymied. Because I was there to hold their hands in a training setting, I
found a way around the problem by logging them in as me and we continued the
training session on that basis (but not an option to the user sitting at
home frustratingly typing in Capcha responses until they got frustrated and
walked away).
So, Aaron, it may be that your research on the impact of the VE was impacted
by this bug. I imagine that users affected would have eventually aborted the
edit as they were unable to save, unless by chance they were able to realise
that the problem was caused by their citation and either removed the
citation and just saved the text changes. It's hard to say what the
likelihood of a new user being affected is, as the problem seemed to relate
to the age of the article (I am autopatrolled so I don't think the new
articles would have any "might be dodgy" status flags on them, but I am not
familiar with how that side of things works).
Also, is this experiment (or one similar) currently running? It's just that
when we went into the Preferences of the two new user accounts to enable the
VE, one of them already had it enabled (yet I had seen both new user
accounts created in front of me a couple of minutes earlier), so there was
no possibility that this was anything other than a default setting for one
of the two users. I thought enabling the VE was normally strictly opt-in?
Kerry