On 16 June 2015 at 10:53, Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com wrote:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2010-December/063225.html I just found back this post by David Gerard from 2010 and was struck by how dead-on the discussion and analysis was and how far we have actually come with VE 5 years later, even though we still did not pass the finish line just yet.
:-D
Erik had been thinking along similar lines, and this is about when the VE project started in earnest.
See also Magnus' early attempt: WYSIFTW, which had a similar "full page" editor interface to VE. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WYSIFTW (A page I just edited very quickly and efficiently in VE.)
I think VE is really close now to being usable in production, but I think that we are FAR from done on this front. Like was stated, templates are a real problem. A UI problem, and one that VE doesn't really solve. Citoid sort of does, but just for one small subset of templates.
I think VE right now is good enough to put live for newbies, but getting there was always going to take a couple of years.
(The en:wp advanced user community is *still* upset at how VE was launched, so will take a bit of convincing to let VE go default or even be presented as a default. I suspect a lot of them haven't used it recently and should give it another round of testing and bug-reporting.)
There's a recent Eric S. Raymond post on the sort of problem VE is: he calls it a "Zeno tarpit". http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6772
(How did we get here? Because MediaWiki started off parsing wikitext using a chain of regular expressions rather than a proper parser. Because we had no idea all this would end up this big. From small acorns of decision come huge oaks of technical debt ...)
- d.