Hello Dan! I only described what some reactions were. It has an origin, the background: For some years people on nl-wiki have been very enthusiastic about the idea of a Visual Editor, the community liked it very much and wanted it very much. When the Visual Editor came live on the Dutch Wikipedia, users were very enthusiastic about it and wanted to try it, but very soon after bugs after bugs after bugs after bugs appeared. On request of the team of the Visual Editor we had before the deployment already a feedback page, it is still loaded with bugs, all reported to the team, but still none have been fixed. The Visual Editor makes a really mess of too many pages. The developers of VE planned some time later to deploy the next step of the Visual Editor and making the VE not opt-in but the standard editor for everyone. Besides having promised an opt-out, which other projects did not get and the trust in the VE team was harmed a lot, almost all the bugs that we have reported are still not fixed, even just before the scheduled deployment. The Dutch community got much demotivated and lost even more trust because of this and held a voting about this situation which made clear that the existing VE was absolutely not ready to be made available for everyone, and that on a project were people would welcome a good Visual Editor very very much. This was a huge disappointment. What this disappointment made even worse was that the bugs weren't fixed, and the community got some kind of car salesman from WMF which tried to sell a broken product, which annoyed even more and gave the feeling the community is the idiot, while with the feedback which was given nobody has done anything. The Dutch community is used to changes and some normal annoyance that they have to change habits or fix broken things again and again, but the situation with VE is considered the worst implementation ever on Wikipedia of the past decade. It gave users the feeling that WMF doesn't care for the needs of users who daily do the actual work which makes Wikipedia a success, gave the feeling that WMF things that sticking to a plan is more important than really solving the issues the local users met, and made users feel WMF/developers as unreliable and untrustworthy. This is still in peoples minds after months like a nightmare and still is frustrating. Earlier this year the community of nl-wiki adopted very quick Wikidata as new way of working and also the Notifications tool (Flow) was adopted rapidly with much excitement in September (even while both are not the most optimal and still have bugs). So yes, it is illogical that some users want the VE first ready, but that is the result of a long desired wish to have a fully working VE which apparently is considered a larger need than a better search. I constantly keep trying to inform the community about why, how, when, etc to get a better picture of technical changes. Lucky most users understand that both pieces of software are independent of each other and really like to move on and have the software improved, including the search. Romaine --- tech ambassador for nl-wiki Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2013 17:21:50 +0000 From: Dan Garry <dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> To: "Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects"     <wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Would any other wikis like to try     out a new search? Message-ID:     <CAOW03ME9F_51DuXq0qy1ziJHRLkQfcocwmSc7ZP8d58gE9-Spw(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" It's a little illogical to say no to search on the basis that VE should be fixed first. The engineers involved in search are not involved in VE at all, and saying no to search does not mean that they'll be reassigned to the VE instead. Alas, people can be illogical sometimes. Thanks very much for relaying the results of the straw poll you ran, Romaine! Dan On 27 October 2013 00:27, Romaine Wiki <romaine_wiki(a)yahoo.com> wrote: on the central question. test, 4 say no, 2 say and would like to the current search isn't broken, while broken much more on pages, but that is experience that the worse experiences nl-wiki: we had a poll on working worse and hit a to be assured that searching normally. testing. Certainly for for testing in try out a new search? search that Chad and wikis and influence new search is better than the when they are take longer but they are You can read the syntax in "secondary" mode still go through results from the new search search results aren't immediately blown make it awesome. deemed awesome, we'll will go through it. url parameter CirrusSearch.  If anything goes We'll keep that option open because doesn't.  Many other is happy to search isn't.  Esperanto is worse.  eo wikis should -- Dan Garry Associate Product Manager for Platform Wikimedia Foundation