2010/3/26 Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il:
Whatever they mention, i couldn't understand a word of it, and i do know some HTML and JS.
There are several buttons which are essential to me and which disappeared from the new default toolbar, such as nowiki, strikeout and some others. If i had a convenient way to add them, i wouldn't complain, but that [[Toolbar customization]] page is completely unreadable to anyone but the dedicated developers.
This is a page that was quickly whipped up some time ago, and I agree that it's probably not very readable. I will add a section with some easy instant-copy-and-paste snippets that add stuff like nowiki, strikeout and redirect. If you could elaborate on what "and others" consists of, I'll add those too.
And the embed file (picture) button inserts
this: "[[Example.jpg]]", without any "File:" or "Image:"!
That's a bug, thanks for reporting it.
I reported this bug some time ago via "beta feedback". It seems completely trivial, but it's still not fixed. I rarely insert images, so i can live with it, but many other editors do and i have no idea how they live with it.
I've filed this as https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=22964
I'm sorry, but it is too early to force this on editors. On the technical Village Pump in the Hebrew Wikipedia, for example, the attitude towards the beta ranges from indifferent to negative, and not because of RTL problems, but simply because for people who only read Wikipedia this is inessential and for editors it is rather harmful.
Exactly how is this harmful? The only two problems you listed are a few missing toolbar buttons, which are easily added, and one buggy toolbar button which, by your own admission, you "can live with" (but which we'll of course fix ASAP).
True, some people may have enabled the beta and stuck to it, but what about all those that didn't enable it at all or enabled it and returned to Monobook?
We record both opt-ins and opt-outs. The retention rate (% of users who opted into the Beta and kept it) has been hovering around 80% cluster-wide, with certain specific wikis (such as Japanese and Polish, off the top of my head) showing lower numbers due to specific issues (font size and broken Gadgets, respectively); still "lower" in this case means something like 65-70%.
Do you have any numbers about people who use the beta and actually edit Wikipedia and not just read it?
We don't currently have these numbers, but I suppose we could whip up some statistics about the spread of edit count (more useful metric than "did this user ever edit") among beta users and former beta users that opted back out.
For what it's worth, we'll also be adding a "Take me back" link, similar to the "Try Beta" link, which changes the user's preferences to disable all usability features and change their skin back to Monobook.
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)