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.
Also interesting is some of the follow up to it, which points out that the usability of Templates is also a real problem in itself, not easily solvable with WYSIWYG, but probably just as important.
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 it is important to remember that VE is a framework. The piece that will open up other possibilities, but that we will need to still do a lot of work to find what those possibilities are, how they can make page and article authoring more usable etc...
The post starts with a quote of Fred Bauder: "There has to be a vision though"
So I'm asking: What is the vision for this next step ? - What ideas do people have with regard to usability and templates. - What examples of good editors can we find that also deal with templates/objects etc. - What are our unique challenges ? - What kind of research and development would be needed to deliver this ?
I would love it if we could end up with a discussion and summary as we had back then. A guide for us towards solving this next problem within another 5 years. We and the WMF can probably not start on this tomorrow, but we can start thinking about it.
DJ
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.
The first problem I always think about is figuring out which template to insert - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T55590
Template parameter insertion works mostly fine if TemplateData is defined. This requires some effort from the community, but it's reasonable. But the editor always has to type the template name, and this means that the editor needs to know all the available templates. Needless to say, there are thousands of them in the active wikis. Some kind of a template picker would be a Very Big Nice-to-Have.
A wider problem is that templates do A LOT of very different things, which could be (very roughly) grouped into several types: * talk page templates (different for user talk and article talk) * article tags - {{unreferenced}}, {{Expert-subject}}, etc. * inline tags - {{citation needed}}, {{who}} * infoboxes * inline content - IPA, unit conversion * block content - {{Quote}}
Talk page templates should be largely irrelevant for VisualEditor development, although they should inform Flow development.
Article-level tags should become page metadata and taken out of the page's code. (Done well, this could be a boost to editor engagement by helping get subject experts to take care of problematic content in a way that is better organized than the current backlog categories... but I digress.) Something similar should be done for inline tags like {{citation needed}}, although I don't see a way to separate them from the page's code.
Infoboxes should be migrated as much as possible to Wikidata; ideally, they shouldn't be in the page's code either.
This leaves us with inline content and block content. This is a mix between visual formatting and semantic markup. Largely, the editing communities have done a pretty good job at maintaining it the way they need it for their projects, but unfortunately the implementation is different in every language. A coordinated effort to find common templates that all projects need and integrating their insertion in a smoother way would be great. This was more or less with citations, and it can and should be done for other areas.
As James said in the MediaWiki summit 2015, "global everything" :)
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
2015-06-16 12:53 GMT+03:00 Derk-Jan Hartman d.j.hartman+wmf_ml@gmail.com:
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.
Also interesting is some of the follow up to it, which points out that the usability of Templates is also a real problem in itself, not easily solvable with WYSIWYG, but probably just as important.
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 it is important to remember that VE is a framework. The piece that will open up other possibilities, but that we will need to still do a lot of work to find what those possibilities are, how they can make page and article authoring more usable etc...
The post starts with a quote of Fred Bauder: "There has to be a vision though"
So I'm asking: What is the vision for this next step ?
- What ideas do people have with regard to usability and templates.
- What examples of good editors can we find that also deal with
templates/objects etc.
- What are our unique challenges ?
- What kind of research and development would be needed to deliver this ?
I would love it if we could end up with a discussion and summary as we had back then. A guide for us towards solving this next problem within another 5 years. We and the WMF can probably not start on this tomorrow, but we can start thinking about it.
DJ
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