I've been doing this in Israel for a while already. (In Hebrew! From right to left! Thanks to User:Mooeypoo [cced], she is awesome!)
It's pretty successful.
Basic formatting, headings, and citations are far, far easier to explain using VE.
I do *mention* the source editor, because it's inevitable for understanding talk pages and diffs, but I dedicate far less time to it than I did at workshops three years ago. This leaves more time to do actual article writing. Some people actually stay as editors afterwards (sorry, I don't have a precise number).
I'm doing this every three or four months or so, and it's amazing to see the progress and the bug-fixing. A year ago writing an image description was broken in Hebrew - now it works. A year ago it was impossible to add tables - now it's not just possible, but easy. A year ago it was weird to add footnotes - now it's much nicer; not perfect, but already better than explaining <ref> tags (for a lot of newbies seeing ANY tags at all is an immediate showstopper that renders the whole workshop useless). Using VE in workshops is also great for finding and reporting useful bugs - looking at new users always is.
Wikimedia Israel also uses VE for most of the training materials that it produces in the last year or so.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-07-30 15:00 GMT+03:00 David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: WereSpielChequers werespielchequers@gmail.com Date: 30 July 2015 at 12:57 Subject: [Wikimediauk-l] visual Editor is now worth using in outreach editathons To:
If anyone is still running outreach editathons to try and recruit new editors, you might want to consider using visual editor. I spoke to some of the WMF people at Wikimania and apparently the issue of it running very very slowly on old kit has recently been largely addressed. I've pointed out in the past that as long as that bug was a "won't fix" you couldn't promote Visual Editor at outreach editathons because even if all the laptops look pretty new, there could well be someone present using a borrowed laptop and intending to use an old PC at home. Since we really can't start an editathon asking the attendees if they all use new computers at home, and then reverting to the classic editor if someone says their machine was bought in 2010 I and several others have been ignoring the Visual Editor for the last couple of years.
I have just run a quick test on this myself using a friend's old PC and V/E does now work, though it is still a little slower than the classic editor.
Regards
Jonathan / WereSpielChequers
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